Automatic speech recognition based on multiple level units in spoken dialogue system for in-vehicle appliances

Abstract

The purpose of our study is to develop a spoken dialogue system for in-vehicle appliances. Such a multi-domain dialogue system should be capable of reacting to a change of the topic, recognizing fast and accurately separating words as well as whole sentences. We propose a novel recognition method by integrating a sentence, partial words, and phonemes. The degree of confidence is determined by the degree to which recognition results match on these three levels. We conducted speech recognition experiments for in-vehicle appliances. In the case of sentence units, the recognition accuracy was 96.2% by the proposed method and 92.9% by the conventional word bigram. As for word units, recognition accuracy of the proposed method was 86.2% while that of whole word recognition was 75.1%. Therefore, we concluded that our method can be effectively applied in spoken dialogue systems for in-vehicle appliances. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.