Topic n-gram count language model adaptation for speech recognition

Abstract

We introduce novel language model (LM) adaptation approaches using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. Observed n-grams in the training set are assigned to topics using soft and hard clustering. In soft clustering, each n-gram is assigned to topics such that the total count of that n-gram for all topics is equal to the global count of that n-gram in the training set. Here, the normalized topic weights of the n-gram are multiplied by the global n-gram count to form the topic n-gram count for the respective topics. In hard clustering, each n-gram is assigned to a single topic with the maximum fraction of the global n-gram count for the corresponding topic. Here, the topic is selected using the maximum topic weight for the n-gram. The topic n-gram count LMs are created using the respective topic n-gram counts and adapted by using the topic weights of a development test set. We compute the average of the confidence measures: the probability of word given topic and the probability of topic given word. The average is taken over the words in the n-grams and the development test set to form the topic weights of the n-grams and the development test set respectively. Our approaches show better performance over some traditional approaches using the WSJ corpus.