Language Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition of Inflective Languages

This book covers language modeling and automatic speech recognition for inflective languages (e.g. Slavic languages), which represent roughly half of the languages spoken in Europe. These languages do not perform as well as English in speech recognition systems and it is therefore harder to develop an application with sufficient quality for the end user. The authors describe the most important language features for the development of a speech recognition system. This is then presented through the analysis of errors in the system and the development of language models and their inclusion in speech recognition systems, which specifically address the errors that are relevant for targeted applications. The error analysis is done with regard to morphological characteristics of the word in the recognized sentences. The book is oriented towards speech recognition with large vocabularies and continuous and even spontaneous speech. Today such applications work with a rather small number of languages compared to the number of spoken languages.