Effectiveness of dereverberation, feature transformation, discriminative training methods, and system combination approach for various reverberant environments

The recently released REverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark (REVERB) challenge includes a reverberant automatic speech recognition (ASR) task. This paper describes our proposed system based on multi-channel speech enhancement preprocessing and state-of-the-art ASR techniques. For preprocessing, we propose a single-channel dereverberation method with reverberation time estimation, which is combined with multichannel beamforming that enhances direct sound compared with the reflected sound. In addition, this paper also focuses on state-of-the-art ASR techniques such as discriminative training of acoustic models including the Gaussian mixture model, subspace Gaussian mixture model, and deep neural networks, as well as various feature transformation techniques. Although, for the REVERB challenge, it is necessary to handle various acoustic environments, a single ASR system tends to be overly tuned for a specific environment, which degrades the performance in the mismatch environments. To overcome this mismatch problem with a single ASR system, we use a system combination approach using multiple ASR systems with different features and different model types because a combination of various systems that have different error patterns is beneficial. In particular, we use our discriminative training technique for system combination that achieves better generalization by making systems complementary with the modified discriminative criteria. Experiments show the effectiveness of these approaches, reaching 6.76 and 18.60 % word error rates on the REVERB simulated and real test sets. These are 68.8 and 61.5 % relative improvements over the baseline.