Speaker adaptation using constrained estimation of Gaussian mixtures 论文

详细信息

发表期刊/会议

IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing

发表日期

1995-01-01

发表年份

1995

摘要

A trend in automatic speech recognition systems is the use of continuous mixture-density hidden Markov models (HMMs). Despite the good recognition performance that these systems achieve on average in large vocabulary applications, there is a large variability in performance across speakers. Performance degrades dramatically when the user is radically different from the training population. A popular technique that can improve the performance and robustness of a speech recognition system is adapting speech models to the speaker, and more generally to the channel and the task. In continuous mixture-density HMMs the number of component densities is typically very large, and it may not be feasible to acquire a sufficient amount of adaptation data for robust maximum-likelihood estimates. To solve this problem, the authors propose a constrained estimation technique for Gaussian mixture densities. The algorithm is evaluated on the large-vocabulary Wall Street Journal corpus for both native and nonnative speakers of American English. For nonnative speakers, the recognition error rate is approximately halved with only a small amount of adaptation data, and it approaches the speaker-independent accuracy achieved for native speakers. For native speakers, the recognition performance after adaptation improves to the accuracy of speaker-dependent systems that use six times as much training data.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>