New Methods in Statistical Speech Recognition

Title: New Methods in Statistical Speech Recognition Author: David Klusáček Department: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Prague, Malostranské náměstí 25, 118 00 Praha 1. Advisor: Prof. RNDr. Jan Hajič, Dr., Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics. Abstract: This works aims to identify limits of contemporary speech rec- ognizers and tries to come up with methods that could push back the fron- tiers. After describing the state of the art, the weakest link of the chain has been identified in the acoustic front-end, especially when working in harsh acoustic conditions. NUFIBA front-end, the proposed solution, includes re- verb compensation and speaker/background segmentation as well as contin- uous SNR monitoring which, thru cooperation with acoustic model, hinders from avalanche spreading of recognition errors. Owing to the lack of time, only a phoneme recognizer was finally implemented, although large blocks of originally intended word-based continuous speech recognizer were implemented and tested (such as the MMI-class based language model)