An Iterative Relative Entropy Minimization-Based Data Selection Approach for n-Gram Model Adaptation

Performance of statistical n-gram language models depends heavily on the amount of training text material and the degree to which the training text matches the domain of interest. The language modeling community is showing a growing interest in using large collections of text (obtainable, for example, from a diverse set of resources on the Internet) to supplement sparse in-domain resources. However, in most cases the style and content of the text harvested from the web differs significantly from the specific nature of these domains. In this paper, we present a relative entropy based method to select subsets of sentences whose n-gram distribution matches the domain of interest. We present results on language model adaptation using two speech recognition tasks: a medium vocabulary medical domain doctor-patient dialog system and a large vocabulary transcription system for European parliamentary plenary speeches (EPPS). We show that the proposed subset selection scheme leads to performance improvements over state of the art speech recognition systems in terms of both speech recognition word error rate (WER) and language model perplexity (PPL).