PRACTICAL LARGE-VOCABULARY SPEECH RECOGNITION IN A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT

This paper is concerned with the use of a commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition system by a team of mainstream users in the course of their everyday work. In particular, it describes use by translators working in four languages in a multilingual environment at the Europe an Commission. The paper begins by describing some of the differences between the point-of-view of a typical researcher in speech recognitio n and that of a typical mainstream user. It points out some of the psy chological barriers that must be overcome if speech recognition is to gain really widespread acceptance, and it concludes that such acceptan ce will depend at least as much on the sharing of experience between u sers as on technical advances. The overall results of the trials at th e European Commission were encouragingly positive, but several unexpec ted problems were encountered, many of them related to the multilingua l environment. The paper describes how most of these problems are bein g addressed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.