Telephone-based conversational speech recognition in the JUPITER domain

Abstract

This paper describes our experiences with developing a telephone-based speech recognizer as part of a conversational system in the weather information domain. This system has been used to collect spontaneous speech data which has proven to be extremely valuable for research in a number of different areas. After describing the corpus we have collected, we describe the development of the recognizer vocabulary, pronunciations, language and acoustic models for this system, and report on the current performance of the recognizer under several different conditions. 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past year and a half, we have developed a telephonebased, weather information system called JUPITER [11], which is available via a toll-free number for users to query a relational database of current weather conditions using natural, conversational speech 2 . Using information obtained from several different internet sites, JUPITER can provide weather forecasts for approximately 500 cities around the ...