Vowel Recognition from Articulatory Position Time-Series Data

Authors

Jun Wang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ashok Samal, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Jordan R. Green, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Tom D. Carrell, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

9-2009

Comments

Published in Signal Processing and Communications, 2009. IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (ICSPC 2009), Omaha, Nebraska, USA, 28-30, September 2009. Copyright 2009, IEEE. Used by permission.

Abstract

A new approach of recognizing vowels from articulatory position time-series data was proposed and tested in this paper. This approach directly mapped articulatory position time-series data to vowels without extracting articulatory features such as mouth opening. The input time-series data were time-normalized and sampled to fixed-width vectors of articulatory positions. Three commonly used classifiers, Neural Network, Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree were used and their performances were compared on the vectors. A single speaker dataset of eight major English vowels acquired using Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) AG500 was used. Recognition rate using cross validation ranged from 76.07% to 91.32% for the three classifiers. In addition, the trained decision trees were consistent with articulatory features commonly used to descriptively distinguish vowels in classical phonetics. The findings are intended to improve the accuracy and response time of a real-time articulatory-to-acoustics synthesizer.