A Study on the Removal of Unusual Feature Vectors in Speech Recognition

Abstract

Some of the feature vectors for speech recognition are rare and unusual. These patterns lead to overfitting for the parameters of the speech recognition system and, as a result, cause structural risks in the system that hinder the good performance in recognition. In this paper, as a method of removing these unusual patterns, we try to exclude vectors whose norms are larger than a specified cutoff value and then train the speech recognition system. The objective of this study is to exclude as many unusual feature vectors under the condition of no significant degradation in the speech recognition error rate. For this purpose, we introduce a cutoff parameter and investigate the resultant effect on the speaker-independent speech recognition of isolated words by using FVQ(Fuzzy Vector Quantization)/HMM(Hidden Markov Model). Experimental results showed that roughly 3%∼6% of the feature vectors might be considered as unusual, and therefore be excluded without deteriorating the speech recognition accuracy.