  Deep neural networks (DNNs) are now a central component of nearly all
state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. Building neural network acoustic
models requires several design decisions including network architecture, size,
and training loss function. This paper offers an empirical investigation on
which aspects of DNN acoustic model design are most important for speech
recognition system performance. We report DNN classifier performance and final
speech recognizer word error rates, and compare DNNs using several metrics to
quantify factors influencing differences in task performance. Our first set of
experiments use the standard Switchboard benchmark corpus, which contains
approximately 300 hours of conversational telephone speech. We compare standard
DNNs to convolutional networks, and present the first experiments using
locally-connected, untied neural networks for acoustic modeling. We
additionally build systems on a corpus of 2,100 hours of training data by
combining the Switchboard and Fisher corpora. This larger corpus allows us to
more thoroughly examine performance of large DNN models -- with up to ten times
more parameters than those typically used in speech recognition systems. Our
results suggest that a relatively simple DNN architecture and optimization
technique produces strong results. These findings, along with previous work,
help establish a set of best practices for building DNN hybrid speech
recognition systems with maximum likelihood training. Our experiments in DNN
optimization additionally serve as a case study for training DNNs with
discriminative loss functions for speech tasks, as well as DNN classifiers more
generally.
