USING CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH TO BOOTSTRAP A MODEL BASED SPEECH SEGMENTATION AND RECOGNITION SYSTEM

A method and system for obtaining a pool of speech syllable models. The model pool is generated by first detecting a training segment using unsupervised speech segmentation or speech unit spotting. If the model pool is empty, a first speech syllable model is trained and added to the model pool. If the model pool is not empty, an existing model is determined from the model pool that best matches the training segment. Then the existing module is scored for the training segment. If the score is less than a predefined threshold, a new model for the training segment is created and added to the pool. If the score equals the threshold or is larger than the threshold, the training segment is used to improve or to re-estimate the model.