Correcting complex false starts in spontaneous speech

A primary difference between spontaneous speech and read speech concerns the use of false starts, where a speaker interrupts the flow of speech to restart an utterance. We define `complex restarts´ as those involving deletion and/or insertion of word(s), as opposed to simple restarts which just repeat words (or parts of a word). The acoustic and distributional aspects of such complex restarts in a widely-used speech database were examined here. Identifying the nature and extent of the restart in such cases could improve the performance of an automatic speech recognizer, by allowing the elimination from consideration of some hypotheses based on spectral analysis. Results are given here which allow identification of many complex restarts