The Harpy Speech Recognition System: performance with large vocabularies

The Harpy System [B. Lowerre and R. Reddy, Harpy, a connected speech recognition system, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59, S 97 (A) (1976)] has been extended to run with large vocabularies. The system was recently tested with a 1011‐word vocabulary language permitting about 1012 possible sentences for an Information Retrieval task using a computerized data base. The system achieved 93.77% word recognition accuracy (89.870 sentence recognition accuracy) on 284 connected speech sentences (containing 1580 words) about 3‐sec duration each for a single speaker. The system requires about 12 Mipss (million instructions per second of speech) and uses about 200 000 words of memory on a PDP‐10 system. More complete results, including several speakers and additional sentences, will be reported. [Reported supported by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.]