Turbo Processing for Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is a classic example of a human/machine interface, typifying many of the difficulties and opportunities of human/machine interaction. In this paper, speech recognition is used as an example of applying turbo processing principles to the general problem of human/machine interface. Speech recognizers frequently involve a model representing phonemic information at a local level, followed by a language model representing information at a nonlocal level. This structure is analogous to the local (e.g., equalizer) and nonlocal (e.g., error correction decoding) elements common in digital communications. Drawing from the analogy of turbo processing for digital communications, turbo speech processing iteratively feeds back the output of the language model to be used as prior probabilities for the phonemic model. This analogy is developed here, and the performance of this turbo model is characterized by using an artificial language model. Using turbo processing, the relative error rate improves significantly, especially in high-noise settings.