Japanese speech databases for robust speech recognition

At ATR, a next-generation speech translation system is under development rewards natural trans-language communication. To cope with the various requirements to speech recognition technology for the new system, further research efforts should emphasize the robustness for large vocabulary, speaking variations often found in fast spontaneous speech and speaker variances. These are key problems to be solved nor only for speech translation but also for the general use of speech recognition in real environments. Three large speech databases are designed to cope with these problems in speech recognition and the current status of data collection is reported.