Combining connectionist multi-band and full-band probability streams for speech recognition of natural numbers

Multi-band automatic speech recognition is a new and exploratory area of speech recognition which has been getting much attention in the research community. It has been shown that multiband ASR reduces word error in noisy conditions, particularly in the case of narrow band noise. In this work we show that multi-band ASR could be used to improve the speech recognition accuracy of natural numbers for clean speech when the multi-band (MB) information stream is used in addition to the full-band (FB) one. We also observe that a similar combination method significantly reduces the error rate on reverberant speech. Finally, we analyze the error patterns of the full-band and multi-band paradigms to understand why the combination of the two streams is effective.