Multi-Speaker Language Modeling

Gang Ji, Jeff A. Bilmes

Abstract: In conventional language modeling, the words from only one speaker at a time are represented, even for conversational tasks such as meetings and telephone calls. In a conversational or meeting setting, however, speakers can have significant influence on each other. To recover such un-modeled inter-speaker information, we introduce an approach for conversational language modeling that considers words from other speakers when predicting words from the current one. By augmenting a normal trigram context, our new multi-speaker language model (MSLM) improves on both Switchboard and ICSI Meeting Recorder corpora. Using an MSLM and a conditional mutual information based word clustering algorithm, we achieve a 8.9% perplexity reduction on Switchboard and a 12.2% reduction on the ICSI Meeting Recorder data.