Speaker adaptation of language and prosodic models for automatic dialog act segmentation of speech

Speaker-dependent modeling has a long history in speech recognition, but has received less attention in speech understanding. This study explores speaker-specific modeling for the task of automatic segmentation of speech into dialog acts (DAs), using a linear combination of speaker-dependent and speaker-independent language and prosodic models. Data come from 20 frequent speakers in the ICSI meeting corpus; adaptation data per speaker ranges from 5 k to 115 k words. We compare performance for both reference transcripts and automatic speech recognition output. We find that: (1) speaker adaptation in this domain results both in a significant overall improvement and in improvements for many individual speakers, (2) the magnitude of improvement for individual speakers does not depend on the amount of adaptation data, and (3) language and prosodic models differ both in degree of improvement, and in relative benefit for specific DA classes. These results suggest important future directions for speaker-specific modeling in spoken language understanding tasks.