Abstract

In this paper, the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of children speech are investigated in the context of automatic speech recognition. Acoustic variability is identified 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 significantly 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.

Date

1997

Authors

Alexandros Potamianos, Shrikanth S Narayanan, Sungbok Lee

Journal

Eurospeech

Volume

97

Pages

2371-2374