Public speech-oriented guidance system with adult and child discrimination capability

The Takemaru-kun system is a real world speech-oriented guidance system located at the Ikoma-City North Community Center. The system has been operated daily from November, 2002, to provide visitors a speech interface for information retrieval. This system also aims at the field test of a speech interface and collecting actual utterance data. By analyzing and evaluating the collected utterances, the flexible processing requirements are discovered according to the user´s age group. It becomes impossible to disregard the increase of child users when the system is installed in a public place. The paper proposes an automatic approach discriminating speakers between adult and child users, which is based on statistical learning. This proposal realizes a flexible spoken dialogue to both adult and child users. As for parameter vectors in machine learning, acoustic and linguistic properties extracted from speech recognition logarithm likelihood scores are adopted to discriminate a user´s age group. Although GMM-based recognition uses only acoustic properties, this method can also consider linguistic properties. In experiments with SVM-based screening, we obtained a 92.4% discrimination rate to the actual users´ utterances. The advantage of using linguistic properties is also shown. The paper also describes an overview of the Takemaru-kun system and the data collection status from the field test. Child speech recognition performance is evaluated using the collected utterances.