IPA Japanese Dictation Free Software Project

LREC2000: the 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, May 31 - June 2, 2000, Athens, Greece.Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) is an important basis for the application development of speech recognition technology. We had constructed Japanese common LVCSR speech database and have been developing sharable Japanese LVCSR programs/models by the volunteer-based efforts. We have been engaged in the following two volunteer-based activities. a) IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) LVCSR speech database working group. b) IPA (Information Technology Promotion Agency) Japanese dictation free software project. IPA Japanese dictation free software project (April 1997 to March 2000) is aiming at building Japanese LVCSR free software/models based on the IPSJ LVCSR speech database (JNAS) and Mainichi newspaper article text corpus. The software repository as the product of the IPA project is available to the public. More than 500 CD-ROMs have been distributed. The performance evaluation was carried out for the simple version, the fast version, and the accurate version in February 2000. The evaluation uses 200 sentence utterances from 46 speakers. The gender-independent HMM models and 20k/60k language models are used for evaluation. The accurate version with the 2000 HMM states and 16 Gaussian mixtures shows 95.9 % word correct rate. The fast version with the phonetic tied mixture HMM and the 1/10 reduced language model shows 92.2 % word correct rate and realtime speed. The CD-ROM with the IPA Japanese dictation free software and its developing workbench will be distributed by the registration to http://www.lang.astem.or.jp/dictation-tk/ or by sending e-mail to dictation-tk-request@astem.or.jp