Multiclass Support Vector Machines for Articulatory Feature Classification

Abstract

This ongoing research project investigates articulatory feature (AF) classification using multiclass support vector machines (SVMs). SVMs are being constructed for each AF in the multi-valued feature set (Table 1), using speech data and annotation from the IFA Dutch “Open-Source ” (van Son et al. 2001) and TIMIT English (Garofolo et al. 1993) corpora. The primary objective of this research is to assess the AF classification performance of different multiclass generalizations of the SVM, including one-versus-rest, one-versus-one, Decision Directed Acyclic Graph (DDAG), and direct methods for multiclass learning. Observing the successful application of SVMs to numerous classification problems (Bennett and Campbell 2000), it is hoped that multiclass SVMs will outperform existing state-of-the-art AF classifiers.