Acoustic normalization of children's speech
Georg Stemmer, Christian Hacker, Stefan Steidl, Elmar Nöth · 2003
Young speakers are not represented adequately in current speech recognizers. In this paper we focus on the problem to adapt the acoustic frontend of a speech recognizer which has been trained on adults ’ speech to achieve a better performance on speech from children. We introduce and evaluate a method to perform non-linear VTLN by an unconstrained data-driven op-timization of the filterbank. A second approach normalizes the speaking rate of the young speakers with the PSOLA algorithm. Significant reductions in word error rate have been achieved.