Unsupervised Clustering and Automatic Language Model Generation for ASR

Abstract

The goal of an automatic speech recognition system is to enable the computer in understanding human speech and act accordingly. In order to realize this goal, language modeling plays an important role. It works as a knowledge source through mimicking human comprehension mechanism in understanding the language. Among many other approaches, statistical language modeling technique is widely used in automatic speech recognition systems. However, the generation of reliable and robust statistical model is very difficult task, especially for a large vocabulary system. For a large vocabulary system, the performance of such a language model degrades as the vocabulary size increases. Hence, the performance of the speech recognition system also degrades due to the increased complexity and mutual confusion among the candidate words in the language model. In order to solve these problems, reduction of language model size as well as minimization of mutual confusion between words are required. In our work, we have employed clustering techniques, using self-organizing map, to build topical language models. Moreover, in order to capture the inherent semantics of sentences, a lexical dictionary, WordNet has been used in the clustering process. This thesis work focuses on various aspects of clustering, language model generation, extraction of task dependent acoustic parameters, and their implementations under the framework of the CMU Sphinx3 speech engine decoder. The preliminary results, presented in this thesis show the effectiveness of the topical language models.