THE INFLUENCE OF TIME ON ERROR-DETECTION

Secretaries are needed to type out the reports dictated by medical Spe cialists. Even with a large transcription department it takes more tha n a day before a dictated report is ready to be sent to the people con cerned. The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) can shorten this time interval. A disadvantage is that ASR systems still make errors. As reports must be error-free a lot depends on the pathologists' corre ction capabilities. The correction procedure that pathologists current ly use may not be adequate for correcting ASR errors. To be able to co rrect the reports pathologists must be able to recollect the structure and contents of their dictation. Their recollection is likely to be b etter with less time between dictation and correction. In this paper c orrection performance on the same day as dictation is compared with co rrection the day after. To be able to make this comparison, errors wer e artificially introduced into the pathologists' reports. No differenc e between the conditions was observed, but it was found that pathologi sts had great difficulty correcting the reports. It is concluded that their current correction procedure is inadequate to correct ASR errors and may be inadequate altogether.