Developments in large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition of German

We describe our large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system for the German language, the development of which was partly carried out within the context of the European LRE project 62-058 SQALE. The recognition system is the LIMSI recognizer originally developed for French and American English, which has been adapted to German. Specificities of German, as relevant to the recognition system, are presented. These specificities have been accounted for during the recognizer's adaptation process. We present experimental results on a first test set ger-dev95 to measure progress in system development. Results are given with the final system using different acoustic model sets on two test sets ger-dev95 and ger-eval95. This system achieved a word error rate of 17.3% (official word error rate of 16.1% after SQALE adjudication process) on the ger-eval95 test set.