Speaker adaptation of fuzzy-perceptron-based speech recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a speech recognition algorithm which utilizes hidden Markov models (HMM) and Viterbi algorithm for segmenting the input speech sequence, such that the variable-dimensional speech signal is converted into a fixed-dimensional speech signal, called TN vector. We then use the fuzzy perceptron to generate hyperplanes which separate patterns of each class from the others. The proposed speech recognition algorithm is easy for speaker adaptation when the idea of "supporting pattern" is used. The supporting patterns are those patterns closest to the hyperplane. When a recognition error occurs, we include all the TN vectors of the input speech sequence with respect to the segmentations of all HMM models as the supporting patterns. The supporting patterns are then used by the fuzzy perceptron to tune the hyperplane that can cause correct recognition, and also tune the hyperplane that resulted in wrong recognition. Since only two hyperplanes need to be tuned for a recognition error, the proposed adaptation scheme is time-economic and suitable for on-line adaptation. Although the adaptation scheme cannot ensure to correct the wrong recognition right after adaptation, the hyperplanes are tuned in the direction for correct recognition iteratively and the speed of adaptation can be adjusted by a "belief" parameter set by the user. Several examples are used to show the performance of the proposed speech recognition algorithm and the speaker adaptation scheme.