Title
GANs for Children: A Generative Data Augmentation Strategy for Children Speech Recognition
Abstract
Due to the high acoustic variability, children speech recognition suffers significant performance reduction on most ASR systems which are optimized mainly using adults speech with limited or even none children speech. One of the most straight ideas to solve this problem is to increase the children's speech data during training, however, it is restricted by the more difficult process and higher cost when collecting children's speech compared to adults'. In this work, we develop a generative adversarial network (GANs) based data augmentation method to increase the size of children's training data to improve speech recognition performance for children's speech. Two different types of GANs are explored under WGAN-GP training framework, including the unconditional GANs with an unsupervised learning framework and the conditional GANs using acoustic states as conditions. The proposed data augmentation approaches are evaluated on a Mandarin speech recognition task, with only 40-hour children speech or further including 100-hour adult speech in the training. The results show that more than relative 20% WER reduction can be obtained on children speech testset with the proposed method, and the generated children speech with GAN even can improve the adults' speech within our experimental setups.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ASRU46091.2019.9003933
2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
children speech recognition,data augmentation,generative adversarial networks
Conference
978-1-7281-0307-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peiyao Sheng100.34
Zhuolin Yang200.34
Yanmin Qian329544.44