Cluster-based adaptation using density forest for HMM phone recognition

The dissimilarity between the training and test data in speech recognition systems is known to have a considerable effect on the recognition accuracy. To solve this problem, we use density forest to cluster the data and use maximum a posteriori (MAP) method to build a cluster-based adapted Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) in HMM speech recognition. Specifically, a set of bagged versions of the training data for each state in the HMM is generated, and each of these versions is used to generate one GMM and one tree in the density forest. Thereafter, an acoustic model forest is built by replacing the data of each leaf (cluster) in each tree with the corresponding GMM adapted by the leaf data using the MAP method. The results show that the proposed approach achieves 3:8% (absolute) lower phone error rate compared with the standard HMM/GMM and 0:8% (absolute) lower PER compared with bagged HMM/GMM.