Advanced Algorithms and Architectures for Speech Understanding (Research Reports Esprit / Project 26. SIP)

This study provides an overview of the major results achieved by a project in the field of natural speech understanding. The book describes the complete speech understanding system, from the speech input of a question to the answer formulated in spoken natural language. All the components of the system are described in detail: speech recognition algorithms, understanding techniques, hardware based on Digital Speech Processing (DSP) and parallel architectures and languages. The main features of the system described are continuous speech, a vocabulary size of 1000 words, training independent of application vocabulary, natural language with limited syntactic coverage and constrained semantic domain relevant to a database enquiry. The book should be useful for researchers involved with the problem of designing a speech understanding system as well as for advanced students interested in the principles and fundamentals.