Towards automatic collection of the US census

We describe a study to determine the feasibility of using automatic speech recognition to collect information over the telephone for the Year 2000 census in the United States. The stages of research are protocol development, speech data collection and transcription, system development, and system evaluation. We developed a rapid prototyping methodology to produce two protocols now being used to collect data from callers solicited by the bureau of the census. We have collected speech from over 1000 callers, with a goal of 3000 complete calls. Two hundred calls have been transcribed at the word level. Initial results are reported for a baseline system tested on the transcribed calls. The baseline system is both speaker and vocabulary independent-it has not been trained on words from the recognition vocabulary. The system's error rate ranges between 2% and 21% for responses to the different prompts. We describe research now underway intended to produce a system that is sufficiently accurate and graceful to demonstrate feasibility of a voice response questionnaire.<>