Modern technologies in teaching FLT — страница 4

because with more similar-sounding words, the confusability increases. The vocabulary size in most commercial dictation systems tends to vary between 5K and 60K. D. The Language Model The language model predicts the most likely continuation of an utterance on the basis of statistical information about the frequency in which word sequences occur on average in the language to be recognized. For example, the word sequence A bare attacked him will have a very low probability in any language model based on standard English usage, whereas the sequence A bear attacked him will have a higher probability of occurring. Thus the language model helps constrain the recognition hypothesis produced on the basis of the acoustic decoding just as the context helps decipher an unintelligible word

in a handwritten note. Like the HMMs, an efficient language model must be trained on large amounts of data, in this case texts collected from the target domain. In ASR applications with constrained lexical domain and/or simple task definition, the language model consists of a grammatical network that defines the possible word sequences to be accepted by the system without providing any statistical information. This type of design is suitable for CALL applications in which the possible word combinations and phrases are known in advance and can be easily anticipated (e.g., based on user data collected with a system pre-prototype). Because of the a priori constraining function of a grammar network, applications with clearly defined task grammars tend to perform at much higher

accuracy rates than the quality of the acoustic recognition would suggest. E. Decoder Simply put, the decoder is an algorithm that tries to find the utterance that maximizes the probability that a given sequence of speech sounds corresponds to that utterance. This is a search problem, and especially in large vocabulary systems careful consideration must be given to questions of efficiency and optimization, for example to whether the decoder should pursue only the most likely hypothesis or a number of them in parallel (Young, 1996). An exhaustive search of all possible completions of an utterance might ultimately be more accurate but of questionable value if one has to wait two days to get a result. Trade-offs are therefore necessary to maximize the search results while at the

same time minimizing the amount of CPU and recognition time. PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN ISSUES IN SPEECH APPLICATIONS For educators and developers interested in deploying ASR in CALL applications, perhaps the most important consideration is recognition performance: How good is the technology? Is it ready to be deployed in language learning? These questions cannot be answered except with reference to particular applications of the technology, and therefore touch on a key issue in ASR development: the issue of human-machine interface design. As we recall, speech recognition performance is always domain specific--a machine can only do what it is programmed to do, and a recognizer with models trained to recognize business news dictation under laboratory conditions will be unable to

handle spontaneous conversational speech transmitted over noisy telephone channels. The question that needs to be answered is therefore not simply "How good is ASR technology?" but rather, "What do we want to use it for?" and "How do we get it to perform the task?" In the following section, we will address the issue of system performance as it relates to a number of successful commercial speech applications. By emphasizing the distinction between recognizer performance on the one hand--understood in terms of "raw" recognition accuracy--and system performance on the other; we suggest how the latter can be optimized within an overall design that takes into account not only the factors that affect recognizer performance as such, but also, and

perhaps even more importantly, considerations of human-machine interface design. Historically, basic speech recognition research has focused almost exclusively on optimizing large vocabulary speaker-independent recognition of continuous dictation. A major impetus for this research has come from US government sponsored competitions held annually by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The main emphasis of these competitions has been on improving the "raw" recognition accuracy--calculated in terms of average omissions, insertions, and substitutions--of large-vocabulary continuous speech recognizers (LVCSRs) in the task of recognizing read sentence material from a number of standard sources (e.g., The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times). The best