Performance of Vocabulary-Independent Speech Recognizers with Speaker Adaptation

In this paper, we investigated performance of a vocabulary-independent speech recognizer with speaker adaptation. The vocabulary-independent speech recognizer does not require task-oriented speech databases to estimate HMM parameters, but adapts the parameters recursively by using input speech and recognition results. The recognizer has the advantage that it relieves efforts to record the speech databases and can be easily adapted to a new task and a new speaker with different recognition vocabulary without losing recognition accuracies. Experimental results showed that the vocabulary-independent speech recognizer with supervised offline speaker adaptation reduced 40% of recognition errors when 80 words from the same vocabulary as test data were used as adaptation data. The recognizer with unsupervised online speaker adaptation reduced abut 43% of recognition errors. This performance is comparable to that of a speaker-independent speech recognizer trained by a task-oriented speech database.