A fast and reliable rate of speech detector

In this paper, we present a new rate-of-speech (ROS) detector that operates independently from the recognition process. This detector is evaluated on the TIMIT corpus and positioned with respect to other ROS detectors. The ROS estimate is subsequently used to compensate for the effects of unusual speech rates on continuous speech recognition. We report on results obtained with two ROS compensation techniques on a speaker-independent acoustic-phonetic decoding task.