Error Analysis of Field Trial Results of a Spoken Dialogue System for Telecommunications Applications

Shingo KUROIWA
Kazuya TAKEDA
Masaki NAITO
Naomi INOUE
Seiichi YAMAMOTO

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E78-D    No.6    pp.636-641
Publication Date: 1995/06/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Spoken Language Processing)
Category: 
Keyword: 
speech recognition,  dialogue system,  field trial,  telephone,  

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Summary: 
We carried out a one year field trial of a voice-activated automatic telephone exchange service at KDD Laboratories which has about 200 branch phones. This system has DSP-based continuous speech recognition hardware which can process incoming calls in real time using a vocabulary of 300 words. The recognition accuracy was found to be 92.5% for speech read from a written text under laboratory conditions independent of the speaker. In this paper, we describe the performance of the system obtained as a result of the field trial. Apart from recognition accuracy, there was about 20% error due to out-of-vocabulary input and incorrect detection of speech endpoints which had not been allowed for in the laboratory experiments. Also, we found that the recognition accuracy for actual speech was about 18% lower than for speech read from text even if there were no out-of-vocabulary words. In this paper, we examine error variations for individual data in order to try and pinpoint the cause of incorrect recognition. It was found from experiments on the collected data that the pause model used, filled pause grammar and differences of channel frequency response seriously affected recognition accuracy. With the help of simple techniques to overcome these problems, we finally obtained a recognition accuracy of 88.7% for real data.

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