Neural networks for distant speech recognition

Distant conversational speech recognition is challenging ow-ing to the presence of multiple, overlapping talkers, additional non-speech acoustic sources, and the effects of reverberation. In this paper we review work on distant speech recognition, with an emphasis on approaches which combine multichan-nel signal processing with acoustic modelling, and investi-gate the use of hybrid neural network / hidden Markov model acoustic models for distant speech recognition of meetings recorded using microphone arrays. In particular we investi-gate the use of convolutional and fully-connected neural net-works with different activation functions (sigmoid, rectified linear, and maxout). We performed experiments on the AMI and ICSI meeting corpora, with results indicating that neu-ral network models are capable of significant improvements in accuracy compared with discriminatively trained Gaussian mixture models. Index Terms — convolutional neural networks, distant speech recognition, rectifier unit, maxout networks, beam-forming, meetings, AMI corpus, ICSI corpus 1