• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.315-323
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• 2011

This paper proposes two methods of estimating prior distribution to improve the performance of rapid speaker adaptation based on maximum a posteriori linear regression (MAPLR). In general, prior distribution of the transformation matrix used in MAPLR adaptation is estimated from all of the training speakers who are employed to construct the speaker-independent model, and it is applied identically to all new speakers. In this paper, we propose a method in which prior distribution is estimated from a group of reference speakers, selected using adaptation data, so that the acoustic characteristics of the selected reference speakers may be similar to that of the new speaker. Additionally, in MAPLR adaptation with block-diagonal transformation matrix, we propose a method in which the mean matrix and covariance matrix of prior distribution are estimated from two groups of transformation matrices obtained from the same training speakers, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, we examine word accuracy according to the number of adaptation words in the isolated word recognition task. Experimental results show that, for very limited adaptation data, statistically significant performance improvement is obtained in comparison with the conventional MAPLR adaptation.