Detecting and Correcting Speech Repairs in Japanese

One of the characteristics of spontaneous speech is the abundance of speech repairs, in which speakers go back and repeat or change something they have just said. In other work [7], we proposed a language model for speech recognition that can detect and correct speech repairs in English. In this paper, we show that this model works equally as well on a Japanese corpus of spontaneous speech. The structure of the model captures the language independent aspect of speech repairs, while machine training techniques on an annotated corpus learn the language dependent aspects.