How effective is unsupervised data collection for children’s speech recognition?

Abstract

Children present a unique challenge to automatic speech recognition. Today's state-of-the-art speech recognition systems still have problems handling children's speech because acoustic models are trained on data collected from adult speech. In this paper we describe an inexpensive way to mend this problem. We collected children's speech when they interact with an automated reading tutor. These data are subsequently transcribed by a speech recognition system and automatically filtered. We studied how to use these automatically collected data to improve children's speech recognition system's performance. Experiments indicate that automatically collected data can reduce the error rate significantly on children's speech.