Measuring and Compensating for the Effects of Speech Rate in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition
Matthew Adam Siegler · 1995
This report describes a series of experiments that measure speech rate and that attempt to improve speech recognition accuracy for rapidly-spoken speech. Descriptions of several measures of speech rate are presented, with their advantages and disadvanatges. Speech recognition results obtained using several compensation methods are compared to identify methods by which compensation for the effects of fast speech may yield the greatest improvement in recognition accuracy. Very simple measures of speech rate such as the word rate or phone rate are found to be unsuitable for detection of both long-term and short-term speech rate since they are sensitive to the lexical content of speech. In contrast, the phone duration percentile, a comparison of measured versus expected phone duration, is shown to be robust with respect to lexical content and consistent with previous findings about the statistics of long-term and short-term speech rate. Using this metric, speakers with a speech rate in the...