Modeling word-level rate-of-speech variation in large vocabulary conversational speech recognition

Variations in rate of speech (ROS) produce variations in both spectral features and word pronunciations that affect automatic speech recognition systems. To deal with these ROS effects, we propose to use a set of parallel rate-specific acoustic and pronunciation models. Rate switching is permitted at word boundaries, to allow within-sentence speech rate variation, which is common in conversational speech. Because of the parallel structure of rate-specific models and the maximum likelihood decoding method, our approach does not