A convergence analysis of log-linear training and its application to speech recognition

Log-linear models are a promising approach for speech recognition. Typically, log-linear models are trained according to a strictly convex criterion. Optimization algorithms are guaranteed to converge to the unique global optimum of the objective function from any initialization. For large-scale applications, considerations in the limit of infinite iterations are not sufficient. We show that log-linear training can be a highly ill-conditioned optimization problem, resulting in extremely slow convergence. Conversely, the optimization problem can be preconditioned by feature transformations. Making use of our convergence analysis, we improve our log-linear speech recognition system and achieve a strong reduction of its training time. In addition, we validate our analysis on a continuous handwriting recognition task.