Towards intoxicated speech recognition

In a real-life scenario, the acoustic characteristics of speech often suffer from the variations induced by diverse environmental noises and different speakers. To overcome the speaker-related speech variation problem for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), many speaker adaptation techniques have been proposed and studied. Almost all of these studies, however, only considered the speakers' long-term traits, such as age, gender, and dialect. Speakers' short-term states, for example, affect and intoxication, are largely ignored. In this study, we address one particular speaker state, alcohol intoxication, which has rarely been studied in the context of ASR. To do this, empirical experiments are performed on a publicly available database used for the INTERSPEECH 2011 Speaker State Challenge, Intoxication Sub-Challenge. The experimental results show that the intoxicated state of the speaker indeed degrades the performance of ASR systems by a large margin for all of the three considered speech styles (spontaneous speech, tongue twisters, command & control). In addition, this paper further shows that multi-condition training can notably improve the acoustic model.