The second step of system building is to define the topology required for each HMM by writing a prototype definition. HTK allows HMMs to be built with any desired topology. HMM definitions can be stored externally as simple text files and hence it is possible to edit them with any convenient text editor. Alternatively, the standard HTK distribution includes a number of example HMM prototypes and a script to generate the most common topologies automatically. With the exception of the transition probabilities, all of the HMM parameters given in the prototype definition are ignored. The purpose of the prototype definition is only to specify the overall characteristics and topology of the HMM. The actual parameters will be computed later by the training tools. Sensible values for the transition probabilities must be given but the training process is very insensitive to these. An acceptable and simple strategy for choosing these probabilities is to make all of the transitions out of any state equally likely.
The actual training process takes place in stages and it is illustrated in more detail in Fig. 2.3. Firstly, an initial set of models must be created. If there is some speech data available for which the location of the sub-word (i.e. phone) boundaries have been marked, then this can be used as bootstrap data. In this case, the tools HINIT and HREST provide isolated word style training using the fully labelled bootstrap data. Each of the required HMMs is generated individually. HINIT reads in all of the bootstrap training data and cuts out all of the examples of the required phone. It then iteratively computes an initial set of parameter values using a segmental k-means procedure . On the first cycle, the training data is uniformly segmented, each model state is matched with the corresponding data segments and then means and variances are estimated. If mixture Gaussian models are being trained, then a modified form of k-means clustering is used. On the second and successive cycles, the uniform segmentation is replaced by Viterbi alignment. The initial parameter values computed by HINIT are then further re-estimated by HREST. Again, the fully labelled bootstrap data is used but this time the segmental k-means procedure is replaced by the Baum-Welch re-estimation procedure described in the previous chapter. When no bootstrap data is available, a so-called flat start can be used. In this case all of the phone models are initialised to be identical and have state means and variances equal to the global speech mean and variance. The tool HCOMPV can be used for this.
Once an initial set of models has been created, the tool HEREST is used to perform embedded training using the entire training set. HEREST performs a single Baum-Welch re-estimation of the whole set of HMM phone models simultaneously. For each training utterance, the corresponding phone models are concatenated and then the forward-backward algorithm is used to accumulate the statistics of state occupation, means, variances, etc., for each HMM in the sequence. When all of the training data has been processed, the accumulated statistics are used to compute re-estimates of the HMM parameters. HEREST is the core HTK training tool. It is designed to process large databases, it has facilities for pruning to reduce computation and it can be run in parallel across a network of machines.
The philosophy of system construction in HTK is that HMMs should be refined incrementally. Thus, a typical progression is to start with a simple set of single Gaussian context-independent phone models and then iteratively refine them by expanding them to include context-dependency and use multiple mixture component Gaussian distributions. The tool HHED is a HMM definition editor which will clone models into context-dependent sets, apply a variety of parameter tyings and increment the number of mixture components in specified distributions. The usual process is to modify a set of HMMs in stages using HHED and then re-estimate the parameters of the modified set using HEREST after each stage.
The single biggest problem in building context-dependent HMM systems is always data insufficiency. The more complex the model set, the more data is needed to make robust estimates of its parameters, and since data is usually limited, a balance must be struck between complexity and the available data. For continuous density systems, this balance is achieved by tying parameters together as mentioned above. Parameter tying allows data to be pooled so that the shared parameters can be robustly estimated. In addition to continuous density systems, HTK also supports fully tied mixture systems and discrete probability systems. In these cases, the data insufficiency problem is usually addressed by smoothing the distrutions and the tool HSMOOTH is used for this.
