Robust speech recognition in noisy environments: The 2001 IBM spine evaluation system

Abstract

We report on the system IBM fielded in the second SPeech In Noisy Environments (SPINE-2) evaluation, conducted by the Naval Research Laboratory in October 2001. The key components of the system include an HMM-based automatic segmentation module using a novel set of LDA-transformed voicing and energy features, a multiple-pass decoding strategy that uses several speaker-and environment-normalization operations to deal with the highly variable acoustics of the evaluation, the combination of hypotheses from decoders operating on three distinct acoustic feature sets, and a class-based language model that uses both the SPINE-1 and SPINE-2 training data to estimate reliable probabilities for the new SPINE-2 vocabulary.