The problem of out of vocabulary words (OOV) is typical for any speech recognition system, hybrid systems are usually constructed to recognize a fixed set of words and rarely can include all the words that will be encountered during exploitation of the system. One of the popular approach to cover OOVs is to use subword units rather then words. Such system can potentially recognize any previously unseen word if the word can be constructed from present subword units, but also non-existing words can be recognized. The other popular approach is to modify HMM part of the system so that it can be easily and effectively expanded with custom set of words we want to add to the system. In this paper we explore different existing methods of this solution on both graph construction and search method levels. We also present a novel vocabulary expansion techniques which solve some common internal subroutine problems regarding recognition graph processing.
We present results that show it is possible to build a competitive, greatly simplified, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system with whole words as acoustic units. We model the output vocabulary of about 100,000 words directly using deep bi-directional LSTM RNNs with CTC loss. The model is trained on 125,000 hours of semi-supervised acoustic training data, which enables us to alleviate the data sparsity problem for word models. We show that the CTC word models work very well as an end-to-end all-neural speech recognition model without the use of traditional context-dependent sub-…
While recent retrieval techniques do not limit the number of index terms, out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words are crucial in speech recognition. Aiming at retrieving information with spoken queries, we fill the gap between speech recognition and text retrieval in terms of the vocabulary size. Given a spoken query, we generate a transcription and detect OOV words through speech recognition. We then correspond detected OOV words to terms indexed in a target collection to complete the transcription, and search the collection for documents relevant to the completed transcription. We show the effectivene…
We present a method to perform first-pass large vocabulary continuous speech recognition using only a neural network and language model. Deep neural network acoustic models are now commonplace in HMM-based speech recognition systems, but building such systems is a complex, domain-specific task. Recent work demonstrated the feasibility of discarding the HMM sequence modeling framework by directly predicting transcript text from audio. This paper extends this approach in two ways. First, we demonstrate that a straightforward recurrent neural network architecture can achieve a high level of accur…
In a hybrid automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, a pronunciation lexicon (PL) and a language model (LM) are essential to correctly retrieve spoken word sequences. Being a morphologically complex language, the vocabulary of Malayalam is so huge and it is impossible to build a PL and an LM that cover all diverse word forms. Usage of subword tokens to build PL and LM, and combining them to form words after decoding, enables the recovery of many out of vocabulary words. In this work we investigate the impact of using syllables as subword tokens instead of words in Malayalam ASR, and evaluate…
Google Brain(谷歌大脑);Mountain View, California(加利福尼亚州山景城(注:此处原文本中该部分是地址,按要求不应提取为机构,正确应为仅提取Google Brain))
Describes an audio dataset of spoken words designed to help train and evaluate keyword spotting systems. Discusses why this task is an interesting challenge, and why it requires a specialized dataset that is different from conventional datasets used for automatic speech recognition of full sentences. Suggests a methodology for reproducible and comparable accuracy metrics for this task. Describes how the data was collected and verified, what it contains, previous versions and properties. Concludes by reporting baseline results of models trained on this dataset.
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture that has been designed to address the vanishing and exploding gradient problems of conventional RNNs. Unlike feedforward neural networks, RNNs have cyclic connections making them powerful for modeling sequences. They have been successfully used for sequence labeling and sequence prediction tasks, such as handwriting recognition, language modeling, phonetic labeling of acoustic frames. However, in contrast to the deep neural networks, the use of RNNs in speech recognition has been limited to phone recognition in smal…
Compared to conventional artificial neurons that produce dense and real-valued responses, biologically-inspired spiking neurons transmit sparse and binary information, which can also lead to energy-efficient implementations. Recent research has shown that spiking neural networks can be trained like standard recurrent neural networks using the surrogate gradient method. They have shown promising results on speech command recognition tasks. Using the same technique, we show that they are scalable to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, where they are capable of replacing LSTMs in the …
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院);Google, Inc.(谷歌公司)
Zero-resource speech technology is a growing research area that aims to develop methods for speech processing in the absence of transcriptions, lexicons, or language modelling text. Early term discovery systems focused on identifying isolated recurring patterns in a corpus, while more recent full-coverage systems attempt to completely segment and cluster the audio into word-like units---effectively performing unsupervised speech recognition. This article presents the first attempt we are aware of to apply such a system to large-vocabulary multi-speaker data. Our system uses a Bayesian modellin…
Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide pathways to large vocabulary speech recognition for African languages: multilingual modeling and self-supervised learning. We gathered available open source data and collected data for 15 languages, and trained experimental models using these techniques. Our results show that pooling the small amounts of data available in multilingual end-to-end models, and pr…
National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学)
Artificial neural networks (ANN) have become the mainstream acoustic modeling technique for large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR). A conventional ANN features a multi-layer architecture that requires massive amounts of computation. The brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNN) closely mimic the biological neural networks and can operate on low-power neuromorphic hardware with spike-based computation. Motivated by their unprecedented energyefficiency and rapid information processing capability, we explore the use of SNNs for speech recognition. In this work, we use SNNs for aco…
Long short-term memory (LSTM) based acoustic modeling methods have recently been shown to give state-of-the-art performance on some speech recognition tasks. To achieve a further performance improvement, in this research, deep extensions on LSTM are investigated considering that deep hierarchical model has turned out to be more efficient than a shallow one. Motivated by previous research on constructing deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs), alternative deep LSTM architectures are proposed and empirically evaluated on a large vocabulary conversational telephone speech recognition task. Meanwhi…
Today, the vocabulary size for language models in large vocabulary speech recognition is typically several hundreds of thousands of words. While this is already sufficient in some applications, the out-of-vocabulary words are still limiting the usability in others. In agglutinative languages the vocabulary for conversational speech should include millions of word forms to cover the spelling variations due to colloquial pronunciations, in addition to the word compounding and inflections. Very large vocabularies are also needed, for example, when the recognition of rare proper names is important…
Many of the current state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems (LVCSR) are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Most of these systems contain separate components that deal with the acoustic modelling, language modelling and sequence decoding. We investigate a more direct approach in which the HMM is replaced with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that performs sequence prediction directly at the character level. Alignment between the input features and the desired character sequence is learned automatically by an attention mechanism built into…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), especially long short-term memory (LSTM) RNNs, are effective network for sequential task like speech recognition. Deeper LSTM models perform well on large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, because of their impressive learning ability. However, it is more difficult to train a deeper network. We introduce a training framework with layer-wise training and exponential moving average methods for deeper LSTM models. It is a competitive framework that LSTM models of more than 7 layers are successfully trained on Shenma voice search data in Mandarin and they o…
University of Maryland, College Park(马里兰大学帕克分校);SRI International(SRI国际);Apple Inc.(苹果公司)
This paper explores the use of multi-view features and their discriminative transforms in a convolutional deep neural network (CNN) architecture for a continuous large vocabulary speech recognition task. Mel-filterbank energies and perceptually motivated forced damped oscillator coefficient (DOC) features are used after feature-space maximum-likelihood linear regression (fMLLR) transforms, which are combined and fed as a multi-view feature to a single CNN acoustic model. Use of multi-view feature representation demonstrated significant reduction in word error rates (WERs) compared to the use o…
In this paper, we review various end-to-end automatic speech recognition algorithms and their optimization techniques for on-device applications. Conventional speech recognition systems comprise a large number of discrete components such as an acoustic model, a language model, a pronunciation model, a text-normalizer, an inverse-text normalizer, a decoder based on a Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST), and so on. To obtain sufficiently high speech recognition accuracy with such conventional speech recognition systems, a very large language model (up to 100 GB) is usually needed. Hence, the…
We present SpeechStew, a speech recognition model that is trained on a combination of various publicly available speech recognition datasets: AMI, Broadcast News, Common Voice, LibriSpeech, Switchboard/Fisher, Tedlium, and Wall Street Journal. SpeechStew simply mixes all of these datasets together, without any special re-weighting or re-balancing of the datasets. SpeechStew achieves SoTA or near SoTA results across a variety of tasks, without the use of an external language model. Our results include 9.0\% WER on AMI-IHM, 4.7\% WER on Switchboard, 8.3\% WER on CallHome, and 1.3\% on WSJ, which…
Exploring the Effect of Segmentation and Vocabulary Size on Speech Tokenization for Speech Language Models
The University of Tokyo(东京大学);Keio University(.keio大学);Graduate School of Information Science and Technology(信息科学与技术研究生院);Faculty of Science and Technology(科学与技术学部)
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are now a central component of nearly all state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. Building neural network acoustic models requires several design decisions including network architecture, size, and training loss function. This paper offers an empirical investigation on which aspects of DNN acoustic model design are most important for speech recognition system performance. We report DNN classifier performance and final speech recognizer word error rates, and compare DNNs using several metrics to quantify factors influencing differences in task performance. Our f…
Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been shown to give state-of-the-art performance on many speech recognition tasks, as they are able to provide the learned dynamically changing contextual window of all sequence history. On the other hand, the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have brought significant improvements to deep feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs), as they are able to better reduce spectral variation in the input signal. In this paper, a network architecture called as convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) is proposed by combining the CNN a…
To join the advantages of classical and end-to-end approaches for speech recognition, we present a simple, novel and competitive approach for phoneme-based neural transducer modeling. Different alignment label topologies are compared and word-end-based phoneme label augmentation is proposed to improve performance. Utilizing the local dependency of phonemes, we adopt a simplified neural network structure and a straightforward integration with the external word-level language model to preserve the consistency of seq-to-seq modeling. We also present a simple, stable and efficient training procedu…
Université de Lorraine(洛林大学);Inria(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);University of Avignon(阿维尼翁大学)
Many Proper Names (PNs) are Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words for speech recognition systems used to process diachronic audio data. To help recovery of the PNs missed by the system, relevant OOV PNs can be retrieved out of the many OOVs by exploiting semantic context of the spoken content. In this paper, we propose two neural network models targeted to retrieve OOV PNs relevant to an audio document: (a) Document level Continuous Bag of Words (D-CBOW), (b) Document level Continuous Bag of Weighted Words (D-CBOW2). Both these models take document words as input and learn with an objective to maximis…
Due to the dynamic nature of human language, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems need to continuously acquire new vocabulary. Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words, such as trending words and new named entities, pose problems to modern ASR systems that require long training times to adapt their large numbers of parameters. Different from most previous research focusing on language model post-processing, we tackle this problem on an earlier processing level and eliminate the bias in acoustic modeling to recognize OOV words acoustically. We propose to generate OOV words using text-to-speech syste…
Speech recognition has of late become a practical technology for real world applications. Aiming at speech-driven text retrieval, which facilitates retrieving information with spoken queries, we propose a method to integrate speech recognition and retrieval methods. Since users speak contents related to a target collection, we adapt statistical language models used for speech recognition based on the target collection, so as to improve both the recognition and retrieval accuracy. Experiments using existing test collections combined with dictated queries showed the effectiveness of our method.
The vocabulary of a continuous speech recognition (CSR) system is a significant factor in determining its performance. In this paper, we present three principled approaches to select the target vocabulary for a particular domain by trading off between the target out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate and vocabulary size. We evaluate these approaches against an ad-hoc baseline strategy. Results are presented in the form of OOV rate graphs plotted against increasing vocabulary size for each technique.
Traditional automatic speech recognition~(ASR) systems usually focus on individual utterances, without considering long-form speech with useful historical information, which is more practical in real scenarios. Simply attending longer transcription history for a vanilla neural transducer model shows no much gain in our preliminary experiments, since the prediction network is not a pure language model. This motivates us to leverage the factorized neural transducer structure, containing a real language model, the vocabulary predictor. We propose the {LongFNT-Text} architecture, which fuses the s…
Brain Machine Interface Lab The University of Texas at Austin(德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校脑机接口实验室)
In this paper we demonstrate end-to-end continuous speech recognition (CSR) using electroencephalography (EEG) signals with no speech signal as input. An attention model based automatic speech recognition (ASR) and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) based ASR systems were implemented for performing recognition. We further demonstrate CSR for noisy speech by fusing with EEG features.
Building an accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) system requires a large dataset that contains many hours of labeled speech samples produced by a diverse set of speakers. The lack of such open free datasets is one of the main issues preventing advancements in ASR research. To address this problem, we propose to augment a natural speech dataset with synthetic speech. We train very large end-to-end neural speech recognition models using the LibriSpeech dataset augmented with synthetic speech. These new models achieve state of the art Word Error Rate (WER) for character-level based models …
In this paper, we present an improved feedforward sequential memory networks (FSMN) architecture, namely Deep-FSMN (DFSMN), by introducing skip connections between memory blocks in adjacent layers. These skip connections enable the information flow across different layers and thus alleviate the gradient vanishing problem when building very deep structure. As a result, DFSMN significantly benefits from these skip connections and deep structure. We have compared the performance of DFSMN to BLSTM both with and without lower frame rate (LFR) on several large speech recognition tasks, including Eng…
An open-source Mandarin speech corpus called AISHELL-1 is released. It is by far the largest corpus which is suitable for conducting the speech recognition research and building speech recognition systems for Mandarin. The recording procedure, including audio capturing devices and environments are presented in details. The preparation of the related resources, including transcriptions and lexicon are described. The corpus is released with a Kaldi recipe. Experimental results implies that the quality of audio recordings and transcriptions are promising.
End-to-end attention-based models have been shown to be competitive alternatives to conventional DNN-HMM models in the Speech Recognition Systems. In this paper, we extend existing end-to-end attention-based models that can be applied for Distant Speech Recognition (DSR) task. Specifically, we propose an end-to-end attention-based speech recognizer with multichannel input that performs sequence prediction directly at the character level. To gain a better performance, we also incorporate Highway long short-term memory (HLSTM) which outperforms previous models on AMI distant speech recognition t…
TTI-Chicago(芝加哥丰田技术研究院);IBM Research AI(IBM研究院人工智能部门)
Direct acoustics-to-word (A2W) systems for end-to-end automatic speech recognition are simpler to train, and more efficient to decode with, than sub-word systems. However, A2W systems can have difficulties at training time when data is limited, and at decoding time when recognizing words outside the training vocabulary. To address these shortcomings, we investigate the use of recently proposed acoustic and acoustically grounded word embedding techniques in A2W systems. The idea is based on treating the final pre-softmax weight matrix of an AWE recognizer as a matrix of word embedding vectors, …
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) meets more informal and free-form input data as voice user interfaces and conversational agents such as the voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, etc., gain popularity. Conversational speech is both the most difficult and environmentally relevant sort of data for speech recognition. In this paper, we take a linguistic perspective, and take the French language as a case study toward disambiguation of the French homophones. Our contribution aims to provide more insight into human speech transcription accuracy in conditions to reproduce those of state-of-…
We describe a method to jointly pre-train speech and text in an encoder-decoder modeling framework for speech translation and recognition. The proposed method incorporates four self-supervised and supervised subtasks for cross modality learning. A self-supervised speech subtask leverages unlabelled speech data, and a (self-)supervised text to text subtask makes use of abundant text training data. Two auxiliary supervised speech tasks are included to unify speech and text modeling space. Our contribution lies in integrating linguistic information from the text corpus into the speech pre-trainin…
Speech recognition based on the syllable segment is discussed in this paper. The principal search methods in space of states for the speech recognition problem by segment-syllabic parameters trajectory synthesis are investigated. Recognition as comparison the parameters trajectories in chosen speech units on the sections of the segmented speech is realized. Some experimental results are given and discussed.
An on-device DNN-HMM speech recognition system efficiently works with a limited vocabulary in the presence of a variety of predictable noise. In such a case, vocabulary and environment adaptation is highly effective. In this paper, we propose a novel method of end-to-end (E2E) adaptation, which adjusts not only an acoustic model (AM) but also a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST). We convert a pretrained WFST to a trainable neural network and adapt the system to target environments/vocabulary by E2E joint training with an AM. We replicate Viterbi decoding with forward--backward neural netw…
Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart(斯图加特大学自然语言处理研究所(IMS))
This paper presents our latest investigation on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for overlapped speech. We propose to train an end-to-end system conditioned on speaker embeddings and further improved by transfer learning from clean speech. This proposed framework does not require any parallel non-overlapped speech materials and is independent of the number of speakers. Our experimental results on overlapped speech datasets show that joint conditioning on speaker embeddings and transfer learning significantly improves the ASR performance.
End-to-end approaches have recently become popular as a means of simplifying the training and deployment of speech recognition systems. However, they often require large amounts of data to perform well on large vocabulary tasks. With the aim of making end-to-end approaches usable by a broader range of researchers, we explore the potential to use end-to-end methods in small vocabulary contexts where smaller datasets may be used. A significant drawback of small-vocabulary systems is the difficulty of expanding the vocabulary beyond the original training samples -- therefore we also study strateg…
Computers still have a long way to go before they can interact with users in a truly natural fashion. From a users perspective, the most natural way to interact with a computer would be through a speech and gesture interface. Although speech recognition has made significant advances in the past ten years, gesture recognition has been lagging behind. Sign Languages (SL) are the most accomplished forms of gestural communication. Therefore, their automatic analysis is a real challenge, which is interestingly implied to their lexical and syntactic organization levels. Statements dealing with sign …
This paper presents a HMM-based speech recognition engine and its integration into direct manipulation interfaces for Korean document editor. Speech recognition can reduce typical tedious and repetitive actions which are inevitable in standard GUIs (graphic user interfaces). Our system consists of general speech recognition engine called ABrain {Auditory Brain} and speech commandable document editor called SHE {Simple Hearing Editor}. ABrain is a phoneme-based speech recognition engine which shows up to 97% of discrete command recognition rate. SHE is a EuroBridge widget-based document editor …
In this paper, we describe KT-Speech-Crawler: an approach for automatic dataset construction for speech recognition by crawling YouTube videos. We outline several filtering and post-processing steps, which extract samples that can be used for training end-to-end neural speech recognition systems. In our experiments, we demonstrate that a single-core version of the crawler can obtain around 150 hours of transcribed speech within a day, containing an estimated 3.5% word error rate in the transcriptions. Automatically collected samples contain reading and spontaneous speech recorded in various co…
For conversational large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) tasks, up to about two thousand hours of audio is commonly used to train state of the art models. Collection of labeled conversational audio however, is prohibitively expensive, laborious and error-prone. Furthermore, academic corpora like Fisher English (2004) or Switchboard (1992) are inadequate to train models with sufficient accuracy in the unbounded space of conversational speech. These corpora are also timeworn due to dated acoustic telephony features and the rapid advancement of colloquial vocabulary and idiomatic…
We present a corpus of sentence-aligned triples of German audio, German text, and English translation, based on German audiobooks. The speech translation data consist of 110 hours of audio material aligned to over 50k parallel sentences. An even larger dataset comprising 547 hours of German speech aligned to German text is available for speech recognition. The audio data is read speech and thus low in disfluencies. The quality of audio and sentence alignments has been checked by a manual evaluation, showing that speech alignment quality is in general very high. The sentence alignment quality i…
This technical report describes the methods and results of a three-week sprint to produce deployable speech recognition models for 31 under-served languages of the Common Voice project. We outline the preprocessing steps, hyperparameter selection, and resulting accuracy on official testing sets. In addition to this we evaluate the models on multiple tasks: closed-vocabulary speech recognition, pre-transcription, forced alignment, and key-word spotting. The following experiments use Coqui STT, a toolkit for training and deployment of neural Speech-to-Text models.
Code-switching (CS) is common in daily conversations where more than one language is used within a sentence. The difficulties of CS speech recognition lie in alternating languages and the lack of transcribed data. Therefore, this paper uses the recently successful self-supervised learning (SSL) methods to leverage many unlabeled speech data without CS. We show that hidden representations of SSL models offer frame-level language identity even if the models are trained with English speech only. Jointly training CTC and language identification modules with self-supervised speech representations i…
Pompeu Fabra University(庞培法布拉大学);Pontifical Catholic University of Peru(秘鲁天主教大学)
The Huqariq corpus is a multilingual collection of speech from native Peruvian languages. The transcribed corpus is intended for the research and development of speech technologies to preserve endangered languages in Peru. Huqariq is primarily designed for the development of automatic speech recognition, language identification and text-to-speech tools. In order to achieve corpus collection sustainably, we employ the crowdsourcing methodology. Huqariq includes four native languages of Peru, and it is expected that by the end of the year 2022, it can reach up to 20 native languages out of the 4…
We propose a novel multi-task pre-training method for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). We pre-train SER model simultaneously on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and sentiment classification tasks to make the acoustic ASR model more ``emotion aware''. We generate targets for the sentiment classification using text-to-sentiment model trained on publicly available data. Finally, we fine-tune the acoustic ASR on emotion annotated speech data. We evaluated the proposed approach on the MSP-Podcast dataset, where we achieved the best reported concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.41 for v…
Neural transducer is now the most popular end-to-end model for speech recognition, due to its naturally streaming ability. However, it is challenging to adapt it with text-only data. Factorized neural transducer (FNT) model was proposed to mitigate this problem. The improved adaptation ability of FNT on text-only adaptation data came at the cost of lowered accuracy compared to the standard neural transducer model. We propose several methods to improve the performance of the FNT model. They are: adding CTC criterion during training, adding KL divergence loss during adaptation, using a pre-train…
A new scheme to represent phonological changes during continuous speech recognition is suggested. A phonological tag coupled with its morphological tag is designed to represent the conditions of Korean phonological changes. A pairwise language model of these morphological and phonological tags is implemented in Korean speech recognition system. Performance of the model is verified through the TDNN-based speech recognition experiments.
We introduce MuAViC, a multilingual audio-visual corpus for robust speech recognition and robust speech-to-text translation providing 1200 hours of audio-visual speech in 9 languages. It is fully transcribed and covers 6 English-to-X translation as well as 6 X-to-English translation directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first open benchmark for audio-visual speech-to-text translation and the largest open benchmark for multilingual audio-visual speech recognition. Our baseline results show that MuAViC is effective for building noise-robust speech recognition and translation mode…
G H Raisoni College of Engg(G H Raisoni工程学院);SGB Amravati University(SGB阿姆拉瓦蒂大学);RTM Nagpur University(RTM那格浦尔大学)
Form about four decades human beings have been dreaming of an intelligent machine which can master the natural speech. In its simplest form, this machine should consist of two subsystems, namely automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech understanding (SU). The goal of ASR is to transcribe natural speech while SU is to understand the meaning of the transcription. Recognizing and understanding a spoken sentence is obviously a knowledge-intensive process, which must take into account all variable information about the speech communication process, from acoustics to semantics and pragmatics. W…
The decade from 2010 to 2020 saw remarkable improvements in automatic speech recognition. Many people now use speech recognition on a daily basis, for example to perform voice search queries, send text messages, and interact with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Siri by Apple. Before 2010 most people rarely used speech recognition. Given the remarkable changes in the state of speech recognition over the previous decade, what can we expect over the coming decade? I attempt to forecast the state of speech recognition research and applications by the year 2030. While the changes to general …
GHRCE;S. G. B. Amaravati University(S. G. B. 阿马拉瓦蒂大学)
Automatic speech recognition enables a wide range of current and emerging applications such as automatic transcription, multimedia content analysis, and natural human-computer interfaces. This paper provides a glimpse of the opportunities and challenges that parallelism provides for automatic speech recognition and related application research from the point of view of speech researchers. The increasing parallelism in computing platforms opens three major possibilities for speech recognition systems: improving recognition accuracy in non-ideal, everyday noisy environments; increasing recogniti…