Robust estimation for rapid speaker adaptation using discounted likelihood techniques

Asela Gunawardana, William Byrne

Abstract: The discounted likelihood procedure, which is a robust extension of the usual EM procedure, is presented, and two approximations which lead to two different variants of the usual maximum likelihood linear regression adaptation scheme are introduced. These schemes are shown to robustly estimate speaker adaptation transforms with very little data. The evaluation is carried out on the Switchboard corpus.