Impact of Dataset on Acoustic Models for Automatic Speech Recognition

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the size of training datasets influences the performance and computational costs of GMM-HMM acoustic models in automatic speech recognition, highlighting the importance of dataset scale.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the effects of dataset size on acoustic model accuracy and resource requirements, an area previously lacking detailed study.

Findings

Larger datasets improve model accuracy

Smaller datasets increase risk of overfitting

Dataset size significantly affects computational costs

Abstract

In Automatic Speech Recognition, GMM-HMM had been widely used for acoustic modelling. With the current advancement of deep learning, the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) from acoustic models has been replaced with Deep Neural Network, namely DNN-HMM Acoustic Models. The GMM models are widely used to create the alignments of the training data for the hybrid deep neural network model, thus making it an important task to create accurate alignments. Many factors such as training dataset size, training data augmentation, model hyperparameters, etc., affect the model learning. Traditionally in machine learning, larger datasets tend to have better performance, while smaller datasets tend to trigger over-fitting. The collection of speech data and their accurate transcriptions is a significant challenge that varies over different languages, and in most cases, it might be limited to big organizations. Moreover, in the case of available large datasets, training a model using such data requires additional time and computing resources, which may not be available. While the data about the accuracy of state-of-the-art ASR models on open-source datasets are published, the study about the impact of the size of a dataset on acoustic models is not readily available. This work aims to investigate the impact of dataset size variations on the performance of various GMM-HMM Acoustic Models and their respective computational costs.