Cool.
In general we expect that increasing the left-context will help, as it gets to see more context.
In practice this is true only up to a point, and eventually it starts to degrade. [at least, this
was true before we introduced the decay-time option.]
In future I was thinking of just hardcoding the scripts to use the same extra-left-context in testing
as in training, just for simplicity.
BTW, if you look at the latest scripts (in kaldi 5.1), you'll see that we generally supply a comma-separated list
of chunk-widths, like 150,120,100,90 or something like that; and the options
--extra-left-context-initial 0 --extra-right-context-final 0
for training and decoding (and also decay-time=20 in the LSTM layers),
and also a variety of minibatch sizes, e.g. --minibatch-size=64,32
(this is important to avoid discarding too many examples when you have a variety of
chunk sizes).
These changes make it easier to do online decoding, and should make the models a little
less sensitive to the exact chunk sizes (e.g. decay-time helps to make it fine to use
infinitely large context without it degrading results).
Dan