Applied Spoken Language Interaction in Distributed Environments (ASIDE 2005) ITRW and COST278 Final Workshop Aalborg, Denmark November 10-11, 2005

Crosslingual Adaptation of Semi-Continuous HMMS using Acoustic Regression Classes and Sub-Simplex Projection

Frank Diehl, Asunción Moreno, Enric Monte

TALP Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya(UPC), Barcelona, Spain

With the demand on providing automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for many markets, the question of porting an ASR system to a new language is of practical interest. To cope with this task the adaptation of hidden Markov models (HMM) is seen as a key step to transfer the models from a source to a target language. In this work we introduce a novel adaptation scheme for semi-continuous HMMs(SCHMM) and apply it to a crosslingual model adaptation task. The task consists in transferring multilingual Spanish-English-German HMMs to Slovenian. Test results show that substantial improvements over not adapted models can be achieved, confirming the efficiency of the method.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Diehl, Frank / Moreno, Asunción / Monte, Enric (2005): "Crosslingual adaptation of semi-continuous HMMS using acoustic regression classes and sub-simplex projection", In ASIDE-2005, paper 18.