On-line adaptive learning of the correlated continuous density hidden Markov models for speech recognition

We extend our previously proposed quasi-Bayes adaptive learning framework to cope with the correlated continuous density hidden Markov models (HMMs) with Gaussian mixture state observation densities in which all mean vectors are assumed to be correlated and have a joint prior distribution. A successive approximation algorithm is proposed to implement the correlated mean vectors' updating. As an example, by applying the method to an on-line speaker adaptation application, the algorithm is experimentally shown to be asymptotically convergent as well as being able to enhance the efficiency and the effectiveness of the Bayes learning by taking into account the correlation information between different model parameters. The technique can be used to cope with the time-varying nature of some acoustic and environmental variabilities, including mismatches caused by changing speakers, channels, transducers, environments, and so on.published_or_final_versio

On adaptive decision rules and decision parameter adaptation for automatic speech recognition

Recent advances in automatic speech recognition are accomplished by designing a plug-in maximum a posteriori decision rule such that the forms of the acoustic and language model distributions are specified and the parameters of the assumed distributions are estimated from a collection of speech and language training corpora. Maximum-likelihood point estimation is by far the most prevailing training method. However, due to the problems of unknown speech distributions, sparse training data, high spectral and temporal variabilities in speech, and possible mismatch between training and testing conditions, a dynamic training strategy is needed. To cope with the changing speakers and speaking conditions in real operational conditions for high-performance speech recognition, such paradigms incorporate a small amount of speaker and environment specific adaptation data into the training process. Bayesian adaptive learning is an optimal way to combine prior knowledge in an existing collection of general models with a new set of condition-specific adaptation data. In this paper, the mathematical framework for Bayesian adaptation of acoustic and language model parameters is first described. Maximum a posteriori point estimation is then developed for hidden Markov models and a number of useful parameters densities commonly used in automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.published_or_final_versio