Prosodic Modules for Speech Recognition and Understanding in VERBMOBIL

Wolfgang Hess, Anton Batliner, Andreas Kießling, Ralf Kompe, Elmar Nöth, Anja Petzold, Matthias Reyelt, Volker Strom

Abstract: Within VERBMOBIL, a large project on spoken language research in Germany, two modules for detecting and recognizing prosodic events have been developed. One module operates on speech signal parameters and the word hypothesis graph, whereas the other module, designed for a novel, highly interactive architecture, only uses speech signal parameters as its input. Phrase boundaries, sentence modality, and accents are detected. The recognition rates in spontaneous dialogs are for accents up to 82.5%, for phrase boundaries up to 91.7%.