ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004

Restructuring HMM states for speaker adaptation in Mandarin speech recognition

Xianghua Xu, Qiang Guo, Jie Zhu

With the tendency of posterior probability taken into account, a state-restructuring method is proposed based on confusions between HMM states. In the method, HMM state is restructured by sharing Gaussian components with its related states and the re-estimation to the increased-parameters, i.e., the inter-state weights, is derived under the EM framework. Experiments are performed on speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous Mandarin speech recognition. The results show the state-restructured systems outperform the baseline system and the combining with MLLR adaptation can lead to consistent and significant improvement on recognition accuracy over MLLR.