Fast adaptation using constrained affine transformations with hierarchical priors

In this paper we present an approach to transformation based model adaptation that combines a fast, closed form solution to the MAP estimation of our transforms with robust priors. The robust priors are found using the technique of hierarchical priors, and a closed form solution is achieved by choosing diagonally constrained affine transformations and a suitable family of prior distributions for these transformations. We show that the method gives results comparable to other algorithms, but with significantly reduced computational complexity and memory demands. Experiments are conducted on the SI Recognition Outlier task from the Wall Street Journal corpus, where speaker independent models have to be adapted to handle speech from non-native speakers.