A method of integrating the Gibbs distributions (GDs) into hidden Markov models (HMMs) is presented. The probabilities of the hidden state sequences of HMMs are modeled by GDs in place of the transition probabilities. The GDs offer a general way in modeling neighbor interactions of Markov random fields where the Markov chains in HMMs are special cases. An algorithm for estimating the model parameters is developed based on Baum reestimation, and an algorithm for computing the probability terms is developed using a lattice structure. The GD models were used for experiments in speech recognition on the TI speaker-independent, isolated digit database. The observation sequences of the speech signals were modeled by mixture Gaussian autoregressive densities. The energy functions of the GDs were developed using very few parameters and proved adequate in hidden layer modeling. The results of the experiments showed that the GD models performed at least as well as the HMM models.
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