Speaker-independent continuous speech dictation

In this paper we report progress made at LIMSI in speaker-independent large vocabulary speech dictation using newspaper speech corpora. The recognizer makes use of continuous density HMM with Gaussian mixture for acoustic modeling and n-gram statistics estimated on the newspaper texts for language modeling. Acoustic modeling uses cepstrum-based features, contextdependent phone models (intra and interword), phone duration models, and sex-dependent models. Two corpora of read speech have been used to carry out the experiments: the DARPA Wall Street Journal-based CSR corpus and the BREF corpus containing recordings of texts from the French newspaper Le Monde. For both corpora experiments were carried out with up to 20K word lexicons. Experimental results are also given for the DARPA RM task which has been widely used to evaluate and compare systems.