Gender effect cannonicalization for Bangla ASR

This paper presents a Bangla (widely used as Bengali) automatic speech recognition system (ASR) by suppressing gender effects. Gender characteristic plays an important role on the performance of ASR. If there is a suppression process that represses the decrease of differences in acoustic-likelihood among categories resulted from gender factors, a robust ASR system can be realized. In the proposed method, we have designed a new ASR incorporating the Local Features (LFs) instead of standard mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) as an acoustic feature for Bangla by suppressing the gender effects, which embeds three HMM-based classifiers for corresponding male, female and geneder-independent (GI) characteristics. In the experiments on Bangla speech database prepared by us, the proposed system has achieved a significant improvement of word correct rates (WCRs), word accuracies (WAs) and sentence correct rates (SCRs) in comparison with the method that incorporates Standard MFCCs.