Enhancing the Robustness of the Posterior-Based Confidence Measures Using Entropy Information for Speech Recognition

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this paper, the robustness of the posterior-based confidence measures is improved by utilizing entropy information, which is calculated for speech-unit-level posteriors using only the best recognition result, without requiring a larger computational load than conventional methods. Using different normalization methods, two posterior-based entropy confidence measures are proposed. Practical details are discussed for two typical levels of hidden Markov model (HMM)-based posterior confidence measures, and both levels are compared in terms of their performances. Experiments show that the entropy information results in significant improvements in the posterior-based confidence measures. The absolute improvements of the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rejection rate are more than 20% for both the phoneme-level confidence measures and the state-level confidence measures for our embedded test sets, without a significant decline of the in-vocabulary accuracy.