Broadcast News Transcription System

This paper describes the 1998 CMU Hub 4 Spanish broadcast news transcription system. We focus on the development and improvements of the system with respect to the 1997 system. Both the 1997 and 1998 systems were developed using exactly the same acoustic and language model training material, thus the improvements obtained resulted from a better utilization and modeling of these corpora and a better decoding configuration and strategy. Specifically, we employed several language models, a larger lexicon and larger acoustic models than our 1997 system. Due to these improvements, we achieved a reduction of 28% in the error rate on this year’s development material.