Calibration of Confidence Measures in Speech Recognition

  • Authors:
  • Dong Yu; Jinyu Li; Li Deng

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Res., Redmond, WA, USA;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Most speech recognition applications in use today rely heavily on confidence measure for making optimal decisions. In this paper, we aim to answer the question: what can be done to improve the quality of confidence measure if we cannot modify the speech recognition engine? The answer provided in this paper is a post-processing step called confidence calibration, which can be viewed as a special adaptation technique applied to confidence measure. Three confidence calibration methods have been developed in this work: the maximum entropy model with distribution constraints, the artificial neural network, and the deep belief network. We compare these approaches and demonstrate the importance of key features exploited: the generic confidence-score, the application-dependent word distribution, and the rule coverage ratio. We demonstrate the effectiveness of confidence calibration on a variety of tasks with significant normalized cross entropy increase and equal error rate reduction.