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Up: Kaldi tutorial
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This tutorial assumes that you know the basics of speech recognition using the HMM-GMM approach. One brief introduction that is available online is: M. Gales and S. Young (2007). ``The Application of Hidden Markov Models in Speech Recognition." Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing 1(3): 195-304. The HTK Book is also a good resource. However, unless you have a strong mathematical background and are extremely dedicated, we discourage trying to learn about speech recognition outside an institutional setting. The intended audience for this tutorial is either speech recognition researchers, or graduates or advanced undergraduates who are studying this area anyway.
We assume that you know C++, and have at least some familiarity with shell scripting, preferably using bash or a similar shell. This tutorial assumes you are using a UNIX-like environment or Cygwin (although Kaldi will not necessarily compile and run in all such environments).
Also, importantly, the tutorial assumes you have access to the data on the Resource Management (RM) CDs from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), in the original form as distributed by the LDC. That is, we assume this data is sitting on your system somewhere. We obtained this as catalog number LDC93S3A. It is also available in two separate pieces. Be careful because there was previously a different distribution of the RM data with a different layout.
The system requirements are fairly basic. We assume that you have tools including wget, git, svn, awk, perl and so on, or that you know how to install them. The most difficult part of the installation process relates to the math library ATLAS; if this is not already installed as a library on your system you will have to compile it, and this requires that CPU throttling be turned off, which may require root privileges. We provide scripts and detailed instructions for all installation steps. When scripts fail, read the output carefully because it tries to provide guidance as to how to fix problems. Please inform us if there are problems at any point, however minor; see Other Kaldi-related resources (and how to get help).
We try to provide some idea how long it should take to execute each step of the tutorial. If there is a limited amount of time available to complete the tutorial, we recommend to try to keep to the posted schedule, if necessary by skipping steps and avoiding following links to more information that we provide in the text. This will help ensure that you get a balanced overview. You can always review the material in more detail later on. If this tutorial is to be given in a classroom setting, it is important that someone run through the tutorial on the relevant system beforehand in order to verify that all the prerequisites are installed.
1.8.13