Mitigating the effects of non-stationary unseen noises on language recognition performance

SRI Authors: Mitchell McLaren, Aaron Lawson, Martin Graciarena

Abstract

We introduce a new dataset for the study of the effect of highly non-stationary noises on language recognition (LR) performance.  The dataset is based on the data from the 2009 Language Recognition Evaluation organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Randomly selected noises are added to these signals to achieve a chosen signal-tonoise ratio and percentage of corruption.  We study the effect of these noises on LR performance as a function of these parameters and present some initial methods to mitigate the degradation, focusing on the speech activity detection (SAD) step.   These methods include discarding the C0 coefficient from the features used for SAD, using a more stringent threshold on the SAD scores, thresholding the speech likelihoods returned by the model as an additional way of detecting noise, and a final model adaptation step.  We show that a system optimized for clean speech is clearly suboptimal on this new dataset since the proposed methods lead to gains of up to 35% on the corrupted data, without knowledge of the test noises and with very little effect on clean data performance.