Kullback-Leibler divergence-based ASR training data selection

Abstract

Data preparation and selection affects systems in a wide range of complexities. A system built for a resource-rich language may be so large as to include borrowed languages. A system built for a resource-scarce language may be affected by how carefully the training data is selected and produced. Accuracy is affected by the presence of enough samples of qualitatively relevant information. We propose a method using the Kullback-Leibler divergence to solve two problems related to data preparation: the ordering of alternate pronunciations in a lexicon, and the selection of transcription data. In both cases, we want to guarantee that a particular distribution of n-grams is achieved. In the case of lexicon design, we want to ascertain that phones will be present often enough. In the case of training data selection for scarcely resourced languages, we want to make sure that some n-grams are better represented than others. Our proposed technique yields encouraging results.