DEMANGE, S. & Van Compernolle, D. (2009) Speaker normalization for template based speech recognition. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, Brighton, U.K, pages 560-563.
Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN) has been shown to be an efficient speaker normalization tool for HMM based systems. In this paper we show that it is equally efficient for a template based recognition system. Template based systems, while
promising, have as potential drawback that templates maintain all non phonetic details apart from the essential phonemic properties; i.e. they retain information on speaker and acoustic recording circumstances. This may lead to a very inefficient
usage of the database. We show that after VTLN significantly more speakers - also from opposite gender - contribute templates to the matching sequence compared to the non-normalized case. In experiments on the Wall Street Journal database this leads to a relative word error rate reduction of 10%.
