Use of stress in an isolated word recognizer for French

Abstract

An isolated word recognition system for French is now being developed. This effort is part of an ongoing collaborative project between Dragon Systems, Inc. and Lernout and Hauspie Speechproducts n.v. to port and adapt Dragon's large vocabulary speech recogition system for American English to five European languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch. In English, unstressed syllables have been observed to be quite reduced compared to stressed syllables, while unstressed syllables in French have not been observed to be greatly reduced compared to their stressed counterparts. In the American English recognition system, performance is enhanced when the syllable stress is taken into account. Whether taking stress into account will enhance performance of the French recognizer is now being investigated. The preliminary French system recognizes 1000 words and is speaker adaptable. In developing the system, 3000 tokens from one native speaker of French have been collected. The capabilities of the recognizer will continue to expand and the collection of data will continue to take place. Preliminary results from the acoustic analysis of the speech data and from the experiments with the recognizer will be discussed. [This work is supported by a joint program between Dragon Systems, Inc. and Lernout and Hauspie Speechproducts n.v.]