Bidirectional LSTM networks for improved phoneme classification and recognition

In this paper, we carry out two experiments on the TIMIT speech corpus with bidirectional and unidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. In the first experiment (framewise phoneme classification) we find that bidirectional LSTMoutperforms both unidirectional LSTMand conventional Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In the second (phoneme recognition) we find that a hybrid BLSTM-HMM system improves on an equivalent traditional HMM system, as well as unidirectional LSTM-HMM.