Speech recognitionSpeech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.
Posterior predictive distributionIn Bayesian statistics, the posterior predictive distribution is the distribution of possible unobserved values conditional on the observed values. Given a set of N i.i.d. observations , a new value will be drawn from a distribution that depends on a parameter , where is the parameter space. It may seem tempting to plug in a single best estimate for , but this ignores uncertainty about , and because a source of uncertainty is ignored, the predictive distribution will be too narrow.
Hidden Markov modelA hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it — with unobservable ("hidden") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an observable process whose outcomes are "influenced" by the outcomes of in a known way.
Acoustic modelAn acoustic model is used in automatic speech recognition to represent the relationship between an audio signal and the phonemes or other linguistic units that make up speech. The model is learned from a set of audio recordings and their corresponding transcripts. It is created by taking audio recordings of speech, and their text transcriptions, and using software to create statistical representations of the sounds that make up each word. Modern speech recognition systems use both an acoustic model and a language model to represent the statistical properties of speech.
Posterior probabilityThe posterior probability is a type of conditional probability that results from updating the prior probability with information summarized by the likelihood via an application of Bayes' rule. From an epistemological perspective, the posterior probability contains everything there is to know about an uncertain proposition (such as a scientific hypothesis, or parameter values), given prior knowledge and a mathematical model describing the observations available at a particular time.
Kullback–Leibler divergenceIn mathematical statistics, the Kullback–Leibler divergence (also called relative entropy and I-divergence), denoted , is a type of statistical distance: a measure of how one probability distribution P is different from a second, reference probability distribution Q. A simple interpretation of the KL divergence of P from Q is the expected excess surprise from using Q as a model when the actual distribution is P.
Likelihood functionIn statistical inference, the likelihood function quantifies the plausibility of parameter values characterizing a statistical model in light of observed data. Its most typical usage is to compare possible parameter values (under a fixed set of observations and a particular model), where higher values of likelihood are preferred because they correspond to more probable parameter values.
Speaker recognitionSpeaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to speaker recognition or speech recognition. Speaker verification (also called speaker authentication) contrasts with identification, and speaker recognition differs from speaker diarisation (recognizing when the same speaker is speaking).
Categorical distributionIn probability theory and statistics, a categorical distribution (also called a generalized Bernoulli distribution, multinoulli distribution) is a discrete probability distribution that describes the possible results of a random variable that can take on one of K possible categories, with the probability of each category separately specified. There is no innate underlying ordering of these outcomes, but numerical labels are often attached for convenience in describing the distribution, (e.g. 1 to K).
Maximum likelihood estimationIn statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by maximizing a likelihood function so that, under the assumed statistical model, the observed data is most probable. The point in the parameter space that maximizes the likelihood function is called the maximum likelihood estimate. The logic of maximum likelihood is both intuitive and flexible, and as such the method has become a dominant means of statistical inference.
Nonparametric statisticsNonparametric statistics is the type of statistics that is not restricted by assumptions concerning the nature of the population from which a sample is drawn. This is opposed to parametric statistics, for which a problem is restricted a priori by assumptions concerning the specific distribution of the population (such as the normal distribution) and parameters (such the mean or variance).
Prior probabilityA prior probability distribution of an uncertain quantity, often simply called the prior, is its assumed probability distribution before some evidence is taken into account. For example, the prior could be the probability distribution representing the relative proportions of voters who will vote for a particular politician in a future election. The unknown quantity may be a parameter of the model or a latent variable rather than an observable variable.
Divergence (statistics)In information geometry, a divergence is a kind of statistical distance: a binary function which establishes the separation from one probability distribution to another on a statistical manifold. The simplest divergence is squared Euclidean distance (SED), and divergences can be viewed as generalizations of SED. The other most important divergence is relative entropy (also called Kullback–Leibler divergence), which is central to information theory.
Parametric modelIn statistics, a parametric model or parametric family or finite-dimensional model is a particular class of statistical models. Specifically, a parametric model is a family of probability distributions that has a finite number of parameters. A statistical model is a collection of probability distributions on some sample space. We assume that the collection, P, is indexed by some set Θ. The set Θ is called the parameter set or, more commonly, the parameter space.
Likelihood principleIn statistics, the likelihood principle is the proposition that, given a statistical model, all the evidence in a sample relevant to model parameters is contained in the likelihood function. A likelihood function arises from a probability density function considered as a function of its distributional parameterization argument.
Bayesian probabilityBayesian probability (ˈbeɪziən or ˈbeɪʒən ) is an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of propositional logic that enables reasoning with hypotheses; that is, with propositions whose truth or falsity is unknown.
Inductive probabilityInductive probability attempts to give the probability of future events based on past events. It is the basis for inductive reasoning, and gives the mathematical basis for learning and the perception of patterns. It is a source of knowledge about the world. There are three sources of knowledge: inference, communication, and deduction. Communication relays information found using other methods. Deduction establishes new facts based on existing facts. Inference establishes new facts from data. Its basis is Bayes' theorem.
Dirichlet negative multinomial distributionIn probability theory and statistics, the Dirichlet negative multinomial distribution is a multivariate distribution on the non-negative integers. It is a multivariate extension of the beta negative binomial distribution. It is also a generalization of the negative multinomial distribution (NM(k, p)) allowing for heterogeneity or overdispersion to the probability vector. It is used in quantitative marketing research to flexibly model the number of household transactions across multiple brands.
Speech processingSpeech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to speech signals. Aspects of speech processing includes the acquisition, manipulation, storage, transfer and output of speech signals. Different speech processing tasks include speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, etc.
F-divergenceIn probability theory, an -divergence is a function that measures the difference between two probability distributions and . Many common divergences, such as KL-divergence, Hellinger distance, and total variation distance, are special cases of -divergence. These divergences were introduced by Alfréd Rényi in the same paper where he introduced the well-known Rényi entropy. He proved that these divergences decrease in Markov processes.
