A General Approach to Speech Recognition

The aim is to build a speech based query interface to a text retrieval system. The interface will be independent of the underlying Information Retrieval engine. First steps in this project will be presented in this paper. A study of the properties of typical Information Retrieval queries has shown that the speech interface must effectively address requirements like speaker independence, fluently spoken speech, and uncontrolled vocabulary. These requirements can only be approximated with the currently available speech recognition techniques. Furthermore, such requirements demand a multidisciplinary approach from areas like signal processing, pattern recognition, and linguistics. In order to coordinate these approaches and to be open for further developments in these areas, a speech recognition architecture has been introduced and this will also be presented.