Effectiveness of discriminative training and feature transformation for reverberated and noisy speech

Automatic speech recognition in the presence of non-stationary interference and reverberation remains a challenging problem. The 2^nd 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge introduces a new and difficult task with time-varying reverberation and non-stationary interference including natural background speech, home noises, or music. This paper establishes baselines using state-of-the-art ASR techniques such as discriminative training and various feature transformation on the middle-vocabulary sub-task of this challenge. In addition, we propose an augmented discriminative feature transformation that introduces arbitrary features to a discriminative feature transformation. We present experimental results showing that discriminative training of model parameters and feature transforms is highly effective for this task, and that the augmented feature transformation provides some preliminary benefits. The training code will be released as an advanced ASR baseline.