Language model adaptation using WFST-based speaking-style translation

This paper describes a new approach to language model adaptation for speech recognition based on the statistical framework of speech translation. The main idea of this approach is to compose a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) that translates sentence styles from in-domain to out-of-domain. It enables to integrate language models of different styles of speaking or dialects and even of different vocabularies. The WFST is built by combining in-domain and out-of-domain models through the translation, while each model and the translation itself is expressed as a WFST. We apply this technique to building language models for spontaneous speech recognition using large written-style corpora. We conducted experiments on a 20k-word Japanese spontaneous speech recognition task. With a small in-domain corpus, a 2.9% absolute improvement in word error rate is achieved over the in-domain model.