Switching to and combining offline-adapted cluster acoustic models based on unsupervised segment classification

Abstract

The performance of automatic speech recognition system degrades significantly when the incoming audio differs from training data. Maximum likelihood linear regression has been widely used for unsupervised adaptation, usually in a multiple-pass recognition process. Here we present a novel adaptation framework for which the offline, supervised, high-quality adaptation is applied to clustered channel/speaker conditions that are defined with automatic and manual clustering of the training data. Upon online recognition, each speech segment is classified into one of the training clusters in an unsupervised way, and the corresponding top acoustic models are used for recognition. Recognition lattice outputs are combined. Experiments are performed on the Wall Street Journal data, and a 37.5% relative reduction of Word Error Rate is reported. The proposed approach is also compared with a general speaker adaptive training approach.