Exploring Dynamic Parameters for Vietnamese Gender-Independent ASR

TL;DR

This paper introduces dynamic spectral parameters combined with traditional features to improve Vietnamese ASR, achieving lower error rates and greater gender independence by capturing speech's temporal and tonal characteristics.

Contribution

It proposes a novel set of dynamic parameters based on SSCFs and their combination with MFCCs, enhancing gender robustness in Vietnamese ASR.

Findings

Significantly reduces word error rates.

Exhibits greater gender independence.

Improves robustness of tonal information representation.

Abstract

The dynamic characteristics of speech signal provides temporal information and play an important role in enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In this work, we characterized the acoustic transitions in a ratio plane of Spectral Subband Centroid Frequencies (SSCFs) using polar parameters to capture the dynamic characteristics of the speech and minimize spectral variation. These dynamic parameters were combined with Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) in Vietnamese ASR to capture more detailed spectral information. The SSCF0 was used as a pseudo-feature for the fundamental frequency (F0) to describe the tonal information robustly. The findings showed that the proposed parameters significantly reduce word error rates and exhibit greater gender independence than the baseline MFCCs.