A layered approach for Dutch large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

In this paper we investigate whether a layered architecture that has already proven its value for small tasks, works for a system with large lexica (400k words) and language models (5-grams) as well. The architecture was designed to decouple phone and word recognition which allows for the integration of more complex linguistic components, especially at the sub-word level. It was tested on the Dutch language which - with its large variety of accents and rich morphology - is ideally suited to benefit from this integration. The results reveal that the architecture is already competitive to an all-in-one approach in which acoustic models, language models and lexicon are all applied simultaneously. Candidates for further improvement to the system based on a conditional phone confusion model are suggested.Pelemans J., Demuynck K., Wambacq P., ''A layered approach for Dutch large vocabulary continuous speech recognition'', Proceedings 37th international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing - ICASSP’2012, March 25-30, 2012, Kyoto, Japan (accepted).status: publishe

A layered approach for Dutch large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

In this paper we investigate whether a layered architecture that has already proven its value for small tasks, works for a system with large lexica (400k words) and language models (5-grams) as well. The architecture was designed to decouple phone and word recognition which allows for the integration of more complex linguistic components, especially at the sub-word level. It was tested on the Dutch language which - with its large variety of accents and rich morphology - is ideally suited to benefit from this integration. The results reveal that the architecture is already competitive to an all-in-one approach in which acoustic models, language models and lexicon are all applied simultaneously. Candidates for further improvement to the system based on a conditional phone confusion model are suggested