Homogeneous Speaker Features for on-the-Fly Dysarthric and Elderly Speaker Adaptation and Speech Recognition

The application of data-intensive automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies to dysarthric and elderly adult speech is confronted by their mismatch against healthy and non-aged voices, data scarcity and large speaker-level variability. To this end, this paper proposes two novel data-efficient methods to learn homogeneous dysarthric and elderly speaker-level features for rapid, on-the-fly test-time adaptation of DNN/TDNN and Conformer ASR models. These include: 1) speaker-level variance-regularized spectral basis embedding (VR-SBE) features that exploit a special regularization term to enforce homogeneity of speaker features in adaptation; and 2) feature-based learning hidden unit contributions (f-LHUC) transforms that are conditioned on VR-SBE features. Experiments are conducted on four benchmark tasks across two languages: the English UASpeech and TORGO dysarthric speech datasets, the English DementiaBank Pitt and Cantonese JCCOCC MoCA elderly speech corpora. The proposed on-the-fly speaker adaptation techniques consistently outperform baseline iVector and xVector adaptation by statistically significant word or character error rate reductions up to 2.85% absolute (8.06% relative) and batch-mode LHUC speaker adaptation by 2.00% absolute (8.21% relative), while operating with real-time factors speeding up to 33.6 times against xVectors during adaptation. The efficacy of the proposed adaptation techniques is demonstrated in a comparison against current ASR technologies including SSL pre-trained systems on UASpeech, where our best system produces a state-of-the-art WER of 23.33%. Analyses show that VR-SBE features and f-LHUC transforms are insensitive to speaker-level data quantity in test-time adaptation. T-SNE visualization reveals they have stronger speaker-level homogeneity than baseline iVectors, xVectors and batch-mode LHUC transforms.