Speaker and gender normalization for continuous-density hidden Markov models

We describe a speaker-cluster normalization algorithm that we applied to both gender-normalization and speaker-normalization. To achieve parameter sharing the acoustic space is partitioned into classes. A maximum likelihood approach has been proposed under which the data between the distribution mean and its corresponding acoustic class is mostly speaker-independent, whereas the means of the acoustic classes are mostly speaker-dependent. When applied to gender-normalization the error rate reduction approaches that of a gender-dependent system but with half the number of parameters. For a speaker-normalized system, a 30% decrease in error rate was obtained in a batch recognition experiment in a context-dependent continuous-density HMM system.