This paper gives an overview of the Philips research system for phonem
e-based, large-vocabulary, continuous-speech recognition. The system h
as been successfully applied to various tasks in the German and (Ameri
can) English languages, ranging from small vocabulary tasks to very la
rge vocabulary tasks. Here, we concentrate on continuous-speech recogn
ition for dictation in real applications, the dictation of legal repor
ts and radiology reports in German. We describe this task and report o
n experimental results. We also describe a commercial PC-based dictati
on system which includes a PC implementation of our scientific recogni
tion prototype. In order to allow for a comparison with the performanc
e of other systems, a section with an evaluation on the standard Wall
Street Journal task (dictation of American English newspaper text) is
supplied. The recognition architecture is based on an integrated stati
stical approach. We describe the characteristic features of the system
as opposed to other systems: 1. the Viterbi criterion is consistently
applied both in training and testing; 2. continuous mixture densities
are used without tying or smoothing; 3. time-synchronous beam search
in connection with a phoneme look-ahead is applied to a tree-organized
lexicon.