Rapid speaker adaptation using MLLR and subspace regression classes

In recent years, various adaptation techniques for hidden Markov modeling with mixture Gaussians have been proposed, most notably MAP estimation and MLLR transformation. When the amount of adaptation data is limited, adaptation can be done by grouping similar Gaussians together to form regression classes and then transforming the Gaussians in groups. The grouping of Gaussians is often determined at the full-space level. In this paper, we propose to group the Gaussians at a finer acoustic subspace level. The motivation is that clustering at subspaces of lower dimensions results in lower distortion. Besides, as the dimension of subspace Gaussians reduces, there are fewer parameters to estimate for the subsequent MLLR transformation matrix. This is particular attractive in fast adaptation. Speaker adaptation experiments on the Resource Management task with few seconds of speech show that the use of subspace regression classes is more effective than traditional full-space regression classes.