Transcription of broadcast television and radio news: the 1996 ABBOT system

This paper describes the development of the cu-con system which participated in the 1996 ARPA Hub 4 Evaluations. The system is based on Abbot, a hybrid connectionist-HMM large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system developed at the Cambridge University Engineering Department [4]. The Hub 4 Evaluation task involves the transcription of broadcast television and radio news programmes. This is an extremely demanding task for state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. Typical programmes include a wide variety of speaking styles and acoustic conditions. These range from read speech recorded in the studio to extemporaneous speech recorded over telephone channels.