Are morphosyntactic taggers suitable to improve automatic transcription

Abstract. The aim of our paper is to study the interest of part of speech (POS) tagging to improve speech recognition. We rst evaluate the part of misrecognized words that can be corrected using POS information; the analysis of a short extract of French radio broadcast news shows that an absolute decrease of the word error rate by 1.1 % can be expected. We also demonstrate quantitatively that traditional POS taggers are reliable when applied to spoken corpus, including automatic transcriptions. This new result enables us to eectively use POS tag knowledge to improve, in a postprocessing stage, the quality of transcriptions, especially correcting agreement errors.