Constructing groups of acoustically confusable words

Abstract

Methods for constructing groups of acoustically similar words in a large vocabulary speech recognition system are studied. The study is based on the idea that given a dictionary of words one should be able to take each word and construct a reasonably short list of words from the vocabulary that sound similar to the chosen word. Groups of acoustically similar words are constructed using the hidden Markov models for the words. They are then used in a fast match scheme in an isolated utterance recognition system. The experiments show that a short list of words can be constructed during recognition in a very quick fashion using this scheme and that the list will contain the correct word with a high probability.