Modeling inter-speaker variability in speech recognition

Abstract

This paper details a method for taking into account variability influence in HMM-based speech recognition. The set of Gaussian components of the mixtures represents the entire acoustic space covered for all possible variability values. For each utterance to be recognized, the corresponding variability value is estimated and used to weight and/or constrain dynamically the acoustic space for each pdf. To do that, the weight coefficients of the Gaussian mixtures are set dependent on the variability value. As an example, the variability considered is the inter-speaker variability, and is handled through speaker classes. Taking into account for each utterance the four speaker classes that best match with the utterance signal leads to a significant word error rate reduction on a continuous speech recognition task, as compared to standard speaker-independent modeling.