Toward the realization of spontaneous speech recognition - introduction of a Japanese priority program and preliminary results -

Although high-recognition accuracy can be obtained for speech in the form of reading a written text or similar by using state-ofthe art speech recognition technology, the accuracy is quite poor for freely spoken spontaneous speech. From this perspective, a new national project for raising the technological level of speech recognition and understanding has recently commenced in Japan. This paper first briefly introduces the project and then reports some results of preliminary experiments which have been conducted at Tokyo Institute of Technology.