Dynamic programming search techniques for across-word modelling in speech recognition

We describe the integration of across-word models in the RWTH large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system, where our main focus is on the realization of the acoustic recognition process. This paper presents a study of two search methods based on the principle of dynamic programming. For both methods we discuss the implementation details and give experimental results on the Verbmobil and on the Wall Street Journal data. In addition, we introduce a score interpolation of within-word and across-word models for both search methods. In combination with across-word models this interpolation technique gives an improvement of the recognition accuracy by 14% relative to our standard system.