A real-time evaluation system for a real-time connected-speech recognizer

A facility for evaluating a talker-dependent, connected-speech recognition system is described. It is implemented as an independent system and interacts in parallel with a recognizer in real-time. The evaluator includes software for speech acquisition and storage, connected-speech training, data transfer to a recognizer, database queries, and statistical analysis. Important considerations in the design were the human factors of recording, talker and recording-condition variability, and the embedded training paradigm. Automatic statistical analysis is derived via a simple string-alignment algorithm using just the orthography. In order to demonstrate the use of this system, two experiments are described for connected-digit recognition. These results are presented as automatlcally-generated confusion matrices for insertion, substitution and deletion error and individual string alignments.