Detection and Separation of Speech Events in Meeting Recordings Using a Microphone Array

Abstract

When applying automatic speech recognition (ASR) to meeting recordings including spontaneous speech, the performance of ASR is greatly reduced by the overlap of speech events. In this paper, a method of separating the overlapping speech events by using an adaptive beamforming (ABF) framework is proposed. The main feature of this method is that all the information necessary for the adaptation of ABF, including microphone calibration, is obtained from meeting recordings based on the results of speech-event detection. The performance of the separation is evaluated via ASR using real meeting recordings.