Author:

Keywords:

speaker adaptation, speaker normalization, vocal tract length normalization, PSI_SPEECH, Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology

Abstract:

This paper proposes a method to transform acoustic models that have been trained with a certain group of speakers for use on different speech in hidden Markov model based (HMM-based) automatic speech recognition. Features are transformed on the basis of assumptions regarding the difference in vocal tract length between the groups of speakers. First, the vocal tract length (VTL) of these groups has been estimated based on the average third formant F-3 Second, the linear acoustic theory of speech production has been applied to warp the spectral characteristics of the existing models so as to match the incoming speech, The mapping is composed of subsequent nonlinear submappings. By locally linearizing it and comparing results in the output, a linear approximation for the exact mapping was obtained which is accurate as long as warping is reasonably small.