Title
Transfer learning for children's speech recognition
Abstract
Children's speech processing is more challenging than that of adults due to lacking of large scale children's speech corpora. With the developing of the physical speech organ, high inter speaker and intra speaker variabilities are observed in children's speech. On the other hand, data collection on children is difficult as children usually have short attention span and their language proficiency is limited. In this paper, we propose to improve children's automatic speech recognition performance with transfer learning technique. We compare two transfer learning approaches in enhancing children's speech recognition performance with adults' data. The first method is to perform acoustic model adaptation on the pre-trained adult model. The second is to train acoustic model with deep neural network based multi-task learning approach: the adults' and children's acoustic characteristics are learnt jointly in the shared hidden layers, while the output layers are optimized with different speaker groups. Our experiment results show that both transfer learning approaches are effective in transferring rich phonetic and acoustic information from adults' model to children model. The multi-task learning approach outperforms the acoustic adaptation approach. We further show that the speakers' acoustic characteristics in languages can also benefit the target language under the multi-task learning framework.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/IALP.2017.8300540
2017 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automatic speech recognition,acoustic model,transfer learning,deep neural network,multi-task learning,children's speech processing
Speech processing,Language proficiency,Attention span,Multi-task learning,Computer science,Transfer of learning,Speech recognition,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Speech organ,Artificial neural network,Acoustic model
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2159-1962
978-1-5386-1982-7
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rong Tong110811.33
Lei Wang2401111.60
Bin Ma360047.26