Speech and neural network dynamics
Stephen John Renals · ERA · 1990
This thesis is concerned with two principal issues.Firstly the radial basis functions (RBF) network is introduced and its properties related to other statistical and neural network classifiers.Results from a series of speech recognition experiments, using this network architecture, are reported.These experiments included a continuous speech recognition task with a 571 word lexicon.Secondly, a study of the dynamics of a simple recurrent network model is presented.This study was performed numerically, via a survey of network power spectra and a detailed investigation of the dynamics displayed by a particular network.Word and sentence recognition errors are reported for a continuous speech recognition system using RBF network phoneme modelling with Viterbi smoothing, using either a restricted grammar or no grammar whatsoever.In a cytopathology task domain the best RBF/Viterbi system produced first choice word errors of 6% and sentence errors of 14%, using a grammar of perplexity 6.This compares with word errors of 4% and sentence errors of 8% using the best CSTR hidden Markov model configuration.RBF networks were also used for a static vowel labelling task using hand-segmented vowels excised from continuous speech.Results were not worse than those obtained using statistical classifiers.The second part of this thesis is a computational study of the dynamics of a recurrent neural network model.Two investigations were undertaken.Firstly, a survey of network power spectra was used to map out the temporal activity of this network model (within a four dimensional parameter space) via summary statistics of the network power spectra.Secondly, the dynamics of a particular network were investigated.The dynamics were analysed using bifurcation diagrams, power spectra, the computation of Liapunov exponents and fractal dimensions and the plotting of 2-dimensional attractor projections.Complex dynamical behaviour was observed including Hopf bifurcations, the Ruelle-Takens-Newhouse route to chaos with mode-locking at rational winding numbers, the period-doubling route to chaos and the presence of multiple coexisting attractors. DeclarationThis thesis has been composed by myself and contains original work of my own execution.Some of the work reported in this thesis has previously been published: S. Renals.Radial basis functions network for speech pattern classification.