THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SPEAKER INDEPENDENT CONTINUOUSSPEECH RECOGNIZER FOR PORTUGUESEJo

The development and evaluation of large vocabulary , speaker-independent continuous speech recognition systems are mainly done for the American En-glish language. In this paper we present the work done to date in the development of an hybrid large vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system for the European Portuguese language. Due to the lack of a large appropriate speech and text database to be used in the development of that system we started collecting a large database and at the same time began developing a baseline system based on a smaller database. On this baseline system we applied techniques for automatic segmen-tation and labeling, in parallel with the development of a basic lexicon and language model for Portuguese. In the last part of this paper we also present the rst steps of our work over the new database.