Mumtaz Begum Mustafa and Siti Salwah Salim and Feizal Dani Rahman
A TwoStage Adaptation towards Automatic Speech Recognition System for MalaySpeaking Children
513 - 516
2016
10
3
International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/10003980
https://publications.waset.org/vol/111
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Recently, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems were used to assist children in language acquisition as it has the ability to detect human speech signal. Despite the benefits offered by the ASR system, there is a lack of ASR systems for Malayspeaking children. One of the contributing factors for this is the lack of continuous speech database for the target users. Though crosslingual adaptation is a common solution for developing ASR systems for underresourced language, it is not viable for children as there are very limited speech databases as a source model. In this research, we propose a twostage adaptation for the development of ASR system for Malayspeaking children using a very limited database. The two stage adaptation comprises the crosslingual adaptation (first stage) and crossage adaptation. For the first stage, a wellknown speech database that is phonetically rich and balanced, is adapted to the mediumsized Malay adults using supervised MLLR. The second stage adaptation uses the speech acoustic model generated from the first adaptation, and the target database is a smallsized database of the target users. We have measured the performance of the proposed technique using word error rate, and then compare them with the conventional benchmark adaptation. The two stage adaptation proposed in this research has better recognition accuracy as compared to the benchmark adaptation in recognizing children’s speech.
Open Science Index 111, 2016