Design of fast LVCSR systems

The paper describes the development of fast (less than 10 times real-time) large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems based on technology developed for unlimited runtime systems assembled for participation in recent DARPA/NIST LVCSR evaluations. A general system structure for 10 times real-time systems is proposed and two specific systems that have been built for broadcast news (BN) and conversational telephone speech (CTS) recognition are described. The systems were evaluated in the DARPA/NIST April 2003 rich transcription evaluation. Results are reported and contrasted with unlimited runtime systems and previous fast systems.