Dealing with out-of-vocabulary words and speech disfluencies in an n-gram based speech understanding system

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the e(cid:11)ectiveness of an unknown word processing(UWP) algorithm, which is incorporated into an N-gram language model based speech recognition system for dealing with (cid:12)lled pauses and out- of-vocabulary(OOV) words. We have already been investigated the e(cid:11)ect of the UWP algorithm, which utilizes a simple subword sequence decoder, in a spoken dialog sys- tem using a context free grammar(CFG) as a language model. The e(cid:11)ect of the UWP algorithm was investigated using an N-based continuous speech recognition system on both a small dialog task and a large-vocabulary read speech dictation task. The experiment results showed that the UWP improves the recognition accuracy and an N-gram based system with the UWP can improve the understanding performance in compared with a CFG-based system.