Method and system for acoustic data selection for training the parameters of an acoustic model

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9972306-B2
Application number	US-201313959171-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Aug 5, 2013
Priority date	Aug 7, 2012
Publication date	May 15, 2018
Grant date	May 15, 2018

Abstract

A system and method are presented for acoustic data selection of a particular quality for training the parameters of an acoustic model, such as a Hidden Markov Model and Gaussian Mixture Model, for example, in automatic speech recognition systems in the speech analytics field. A raw acoustic model may be trained using a given speech corpus and maximum likelihood criteria. A series of operations are performed, such as a forced Viterbi-alignment, calculations of likelihood scores, and phoneme recognition, for example, to form a subset corpus of training data. During the process, audio files of a quality that does not meet a criterion, such as poor quality audio files, may be automatically rejected from the corpus. The subset may then be used to train a new acoustic model.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A computer-implemented method for training acoustic models in an automatic speech recognition system through the selection of acoustic data comprising the steps of:
a. training a first acoustic model in the automatic speech recognition system using a training-data corpus comprising a plurality of speech audio files and a respective plurality of transcriptions for the plurality of speech audio files;
b. performing a forced Viterbi alignment of the plurality of speech audio files using the trained first acoustic model in the automatic speech recognition system and determining an average frame likelihood score β r for each of the plurality of speech audio files;
c. calculating a global frame likelihood score δ for the plurality of speech audio files, wherein the global frame likelihood score δ comprises an average of frame likelihoods over the entire corpus;
d. performing a phoneme recognition of the plurality of speech audio files using the trained first acoustic model and the plurality of transcriptions in the automatic speech recognition system;
e. calculating a phoneme recognition accuracy γ for each of the plurality of speech audio files and a global phoneme recognition accuracy v for the plurality of speech audio files;
f. creating a subset training-data corpus comprising audio files retained from the plurality of speech audio files which meet at least one predetermined criterion indicating that an audio file has good audio quality, the at least one predetermined criterion comprising at least one criterion selected from the group comprising:
a first criterion based on the average frame likelihood score β of the retained speech audio file and the global frame likelihood score δ; and
a second criterion based on the phoneme recognition accuracy γ of the retained speech audio file and the global phoneme recognition accuracy v; and

g. training a second acoustic model in the automatic speech recognition system using the subset training-data corpus.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein step (a) further comprises the steps of:
a.1. calculating a maximum likelihood criterion of the training-data corpus; and
a.2. estimating parameters of a probability distribution of said first acoustic model that maximize the maximum likelihood criterion.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein said model comprises a Hidden Markov Model and a Gaussian Mixture Model.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein step (b) further comprises:
obtaining a total likelihood score α r for each of the plurality of speech audio files.

5. The method of claim 4 , wherein

α
r

=

p
⁡

(

x
1

❘

q
1

)

⁢

∏

i
=
2

N

⁢

⁢

P
⁡

(

q
i

❘

q

i
-
1

)

⁢

p
⁡

(

x
i

❘

q
i

)

,

where P(q i |q i-1 ) represents a Hidden Markov Model state transition probability between states ‘i−1’ and ‘i’ and p(x i |q i ) represents a state emission likelihood of a feature vector x i being present in a state q i .

6. The method of claim 4 , further comprising using the mathematical equation

β
r

=

α
r

f
r

to determine the average frame likelihood score of an audio file, wherein β r is the average frame likelihood score, α r is a total likelihood score of the audio file, and f r is a number of feature frames of the audio file.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first criterion comprises determining whether the average frame likelihood β r of the retained audio file satisfies the criterion β r ≧δ+Δ, where Δ is a first predetermined threshold, and wherein the second criterion comprises determining whether the phoneme recognition accuracy γ g of the retained audio file satisfies the criterion γ g ≧v+μ, where μ is a second predetermined threshold.

8. The method of claim 7 , wherein Δ=−0.1δ.

9. The method of claim 7 , wherein μ=−0.2 v.

10. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of using the mathematical equation

δ
=

∑

r
=
1

R

⁢

⁢

β
r

R

to obtain the global frame likelihood score δ, wherein β r is the average frame likelihood score and R is the total number of the plurality of speech audio files.

11. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of using the mathematical equation

v
=

∑

r
=
1

R

Assignees

• Interactive Intelligence Inc
• Interactive Intelligence Group Inc

Inventors

• Tyagi Vivek
• Ganapathiraju Aravind
• Wyss Felix Immanuel

Classifications

• G10L15/144

  Training of HMMs · CPC title

• G10L2015/025

  Phonemes, fenemes or fenones being the recognition units · CPC title

• G10L15/063 Primary

  Training · CPC title