Study of Formant Modification for Children ASR

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openAccess

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Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

Date

2020-05

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

7429-7433

Series

Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

Abstract

The performance of automatic speech recognition systems for children’s speech is known to suffer from the large variation and mismatch in the acoustic and linguistic attributes between children’s and adults’ speech. One of the various identified sources of mismatch is the difference in formant frequencies between adults and children. In this paper, we propose a formant modification method to mitigate differences between adults’ and children’s speech and to improve the performance of ASR for children. The explored technique gives a relative 27% improvement in system performance compared to a hybrid DNN-HMM baseline. We also compare the system performance with related speaker adaptation methods like vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) and speaking rate adapta- tion (SRA) and find that the proposed method gives improvements over them, as well. Combining the proposed method with VTLN and SRA results in a further reduction of WER. We also found that the proposed method performs well even for noisy speech.

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Keywords

hildren speech recognition, Formant modification, DNN

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Citation

Kathania, H, Kadiri, S, Alku, P & Kurimo, M 2020, Study of Formant Modification for Children ASR . in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2020 - Proceedings ., 9053334, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, IEEE, pp. 7429-7433, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Barcelona, Spain, 04/05/2020 . https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9053334