With the aim of setting up a Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, a task named Phonetic Classification can be used. That task consists in, from a speech sample, deciding which phoneme was pronounced by a speaker. To ease the classification task and to enhance the most marked characteristics of the phonemes, the speech samples are usually pre-processed by a front-end. A front-end, as a general rule, extracts a set of features to each speech sample. After that, these features are inserted in a classification algorithm, that (already properly trained) will try to decide which phoneme was pronounced. There is a rule of thumb which says that the more features the system uses, the smaller the classification error rate will be. The disadvantage to that is the larger computational cost. Feature Selection task aims to show which are the most relevant (or more used) features in a classification task. Therefore, it is possible to discover which are the redundant features, that make little (or no) contribution to the classification task. The aim of this work is to apply SVM classificator in Phonetic Classification task, using TIMIT database, and discover the most relevant features in this classification using Boosting approach to implement Feature Selection.
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