Improvements in speaker adaptation using weighted training

Regardless of the distribution of the adaptation data in the testing environment, model-based adaptation methods that have so far been reported in various literature incorporate the adaptation data undiscriminatingly in reducing the mismatch between the training and testing environments. When the amount of data is small and the parameter tying is extensive, adaptation based on outlier data can be detrimental to the performance of the recognizer. The distribution of the adaptation data plays a critical role on the adaptation performance. In order to maximally improve the recoguition rate in the testing environment using only a small number of adaptation data, supervised weighted training is applied to the structural maximum a posterior (SMAP) algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed weighted SMAP (WSMAP) and SMAP on TIDIGITS corpus. The proposed WSMAP has been found to perform better for a small amount of data. The general idea of incorporating the distribution of the adaptation data is applicable to other adaptation algorithms.