Unsupervised speaker adaptation based on sufficient HMM statistics of selected speakers

This paper describes an efficient method for unsupervised speaker adaptation. This method is based on (1) selecting a subset of speakers who are acoustically close to a test speaker, and (2) calculating adapted model parameters according to the previously stored sufficient HMM statistics of the selected speakers’ data. In this method, only a few unsupervised test speaker’s data are required for the adaptation. Also, by using the sufficient HMM statistics of the selected speakers’ data, a quick adaptation can be done. Compared with a pre-clustering method, the proposed method can obtain a more optimal speaker cluster because the clustering result is determined according to test speaker’s data on-line. Experiment results show that the proposed method attains better improvement than MLLR [1] from the speaker independent model. Moreover the proposed method utilizes only one unsupervised sentence utterance, while MLLR usually utilizes more than ten supervised sentence utterances.