Automatic speech recognition for children
Alexandros Potamianos, Shrikanth S. Narayanan, Sungbok Lee · 1997
In this paper, the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of children speech are investigated in the context of automatic speech recognition. Acoustic variability is identi ed as a major hurdle in building high performance ASR applications for children. A simple speaker normalization algorithm combining frequency warping and spectral shaping introduced in [5] is shown to reduce acoustic variability and signi cantly improve recognition performance for children speakers (by 25{ 45%). Age-dependent acoustic modeling further reduces word error rate by 10%. Piece-wise linear and phoneme-dependent frequency warping algorithms are proposed for reducing acoustic mismatch between the children and adult acoustic spaces.