Abstract for hain_stw00

Proc. Speech Transcription Workshop, 2000

THE CU-HTK MARCH 2000 HUB5E TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM

T. Hain, P.C. Woodland, G. Evermann & D. Povey

May 2000

This paper describes the Cambridge University HTK (CU-HTK) system developed for the NIST March 2000 evaluation of English conversational telephone speech transcription (Hub5E). A range of new features have been added to the HTK system used in the 1998 Hub5 evaluation, and the changes taken together have resulted in an 11% relative decrease in word error rate on the 1998 evaluation test set. Major changes include the use of maximum mutual information estimation in training as well as conventional maximum likelihood estimation; the use of a full variance transform for adaptation; the inclusion of unigram pronunciation probabilities; and word-level posterior probability estimation using confusion networks for use in minimum word error rate decoding, confidence score estimation and system combination. On the March 2000 Hub5 evaluation set the CU-HTK system gave an overall word error rate of 25.4%, which was the best performance by a statistically significant margin. This paper describes the new system features and gives the results of each processing stage for both the 1998 and 2000 evaluation sets.


| (ftp:) hain_stw00.ps.gz | (http:) hain_stw00.ps.gz | (ftp:) hain_stw00.pdf | (http:) hain_stw00.pdf | (http:) hain_stw00.html/ |

If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz', which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find tools to uncompress them at the gzip web site.

If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending '.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to find tools to view them at the gsview web site.

We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.