In this work we utilize feature transformations that are common in supervised learning without having prior supervision, with the goal to improve Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (DPGMM) based acoustic unit discovery. The motivation of using such transformations is to create feature vectors that are more suitable for clustering. The need of labels for these methods makes it difficult to use them in a zero resource setting. To overcome this issue we utilize a first iteration of DPGMM clustering to generate frame based class labels for the target data. The labels serve as basis for learning linear discriminant analysis (LDA), maximum likelihood linear transform (MLLT) and feature-space maximum likelihood linear regression (fMLLR) based feature transformations. The novelty of our approach is the way how we use a traditional acoustic model training pipeline for supervised learning to estimate feature transformations in a zero resource scenario. We show that the learned transformations greatly support the DPGMM sampler in finding better clusters, according to the performance of the DPGMM posteriorgrams on the ABX sound class discriminability task. We also introduce a method for combining posteriorgram outputs of multiple clusterings and demonstrate that such combinations can further improve sound class discriminability.

This paper deals with the problem of underdetermined blind source separation (BSS) where the number of sources is unknown. We propose a BSS approach that simultaneously estimates the number of sources, separates the sources based on the sparseness of speech, estimates the direction of arrival of each source, and performs permutation alignment. We confirmed experimentally that reasonably good separation was obtained with the present method without specifying the number of sources.