A Shrinkage Estimator for Speech Recognition with Full Covariance HMMs
Proc. Interspeech 2008
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Date
2008Author
Bell, Peter
King, Simon
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Abstract
We consider the problem of parameter estimation in full-covariance Gaussian mixture systems for automatic speech recognition. Due to the high dimensionality of the acoustic feature vector, the standard sample covariance matrix has a high variance and is often poorly-conditioned when the amount of training data is limited. We explain how the use of a shrinkage estimator can solve these problems, and derive a formula for the optimal shrinkage intensity. We present results of experiments on a phone recognition task, showing that the estimator gives a performance improvement over a standard full-covariance system