Discriminative uncertainty estimation for noise robust ASR

Abstract

We consider the problem of uncertainty estimation for noiserobust ASR. Existing uncertainty estimation techniques improve ASR accuracy but they still exhibit a gap compared to the use of oracle uncertainty. This comes partly from the highly non-linear feature transformation and from additional assumptions such as Gaussian distribution and independence between frequency bins in the spectral domain. In this paper, we propose a method to rescale the estimated feature-domain full uncertainty covariance matrix in a statedependent fashion according to a discriminative criterion. The state-dependent and feature index-dependent scaling factors are learned from development data. Experimental evaluation on Track 1 of the 2nd CHiME challenge data shows that discriminative rescaling leads to better results than generative rescaling. Moreover, discriminative rescaling of the Wiener uncertainty estimator leads to 12% relative word error rate reduction compared to discriminative rescaling of the alternative estimator in [1].