A Word-Based Naive Bayes Classifier for Confidence Estimation in Speech Recognition

Confidence estimation has been largely used in speech recognition to detect words in the recognized sentence that have been likely misrecognized. Confidence estimation can be seen as a conventional pattern classification problem in which a set of features is obtained for each hypothesized word in order to classify it as either correct or incorrect. We propose a smoothed naive Bayes classification model to profitably combine these features. The model itself is a combination of word-dependent (specific) and word-independent (generalized) naive Bayes models. As in statistical language modeling, the purpose of the generalized model is to smooth the (class posterior) estimates given by the specific models. Our classification model is empirically compared with confidence estimation based on posterior probabilities computed on word graphs. Empirical results clearly show that the good performance of word graph-based posterior probabilities can be improved by using the naive Bayes combination of features.