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Expanded Speech Recognition to Include Foreign Accents
Title: Vice President, R & D
Phone: (301) 294-5238
Email: ckwan@i-a-i.com
Title: Contracts and Proposals M
Phone: (301) 294-5211
Email: mjames@i-a-i.com
In this proposal, Intelligent Automation, Incorporated (IAI) and its subcontractors, Prof. Richard Stern of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Dr. Rita Singh of Haikya Corp., propose a novel integrated system to improve speech recognition performance for people with foreign accents. It is emphasized that this team has rich experience in understanding the speech characteristics in non-native speakers. The temporal and intra-phoneme variations introduce mismatches between the baseline speech recognition model and a particular non-native speaker model. Hence some adaptations are needed to update the speaker models for non-native speakers. The proposed system consists of three parts: 1) a speech enhancement module to eliminate background noise; 2) a speaker adaptation algorithm that uses a small training data set to update the speakers’ models in the speech recognition part; 3) a speech recognition system to recognition speech. Our Phase 1 results have clearly demonstrated the feasibility of the individual algorithms. The goal of this Phase 2 research is to develop and demonstrate a real-time prototype speech recognition system for non-native speakers. The system can be portable to any platform such as PowerPC. The system also has continuous and unsupervised learning capability.
* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *