Improving the Accuracy of Speech Recognition Systems for Professional Translators

Our principal objective was to reduce the error rate of speech recognition systems used by professional translators. Our work concentrated on Spanish-to-English translation. In a baseline study we estimated the speech recognition error rate of an off-the-shelf recognizer to be 9.98% We describe two independent methods of improving speech recognition systems for translators: a word-for-word translation method and a topic-based method. The topic-based approach performed the best, reducing the error rate significantly, to 5.07%.

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