Mean and variance adaptation within the MLLR framework

One of the key issues for adaptation algorithms is to modify a large number of parameters with only a small amount of adaptation data. Speaker adaptation techniques try to obtain near speaker dependent (SD) performance with only small amounts of speaker speciic data, and are often based on initial speaker independent (SI) recognition systems. Some of these speaker adaptation techniques may also be applied to the task of adaptation to a new acoustic environment. In this case a SI recognition system trained in, typically, a clean acoustic environment is adapted to operate in a new, noise-corrupted, acoustic environment. This paper examines the Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) adaptation technique. MLLR estimates linear transformations for groups of models parameters to maximise the likelihood of the adaptation data. Previously, MLLR has been applied to the mean parameters in mixture Gaussian HMM systems. In this paper MLLR is extended to also update the Gaussian variances and re-estimation formulae are derived for these variance transforms. MLLR with variance compensation is evaluated on several large vocabulary recognition tasks. The use of mean and variance MLLR adaptation was found to give an additional 2% to 7% decrease in word error rate over mean-only MLLR adaptation.