Speaker independent isolated word recognition for a 129‐word airline vocabulary

Abstract

Previous research at Bell Laboratories has been shown that a reliable act of speaker‐independent word reference templates for a speech recognition system can be obtained from a population of talkers using sophisticated statistical clustering techniques. These studies have investigated a 39‐word alpha‐digit vocabulary and a 54‐word vocabulary of computer terms. In this talk, automatic clustering procedures are used to create reference tokens for a 129‐word vocabulary of airline reservation terms. To obtain the word reference templates, a two‐stage training procedure was used. First each of 100 talkers (50 men, 50 women) used the robust training procedure of Rabiner and Wilpon to provide a single, reliable pattern for each vocabulary word. Second the set of automatic clustering procedures placed each word token into one of several word clusters and produced one reference pattern per cluster. A set of 20 new talkers were used to test the procedure. Several length normalization procedures were incorporated into the testing procedure. Recognition accuracies on the order of 90% were obtained for the 20 talkers. These results are comparable to ones obtained from a speaker‐dependent study done previously on the same vocabulary.