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We describe our initial efforts in building a universal recognizer for multiple languages that permits a user to switch languages seamlessly in a single session without requiring any switch in the speech recognition system. Towards this end we have begun building a universal speech recognizer for English and French languages. We experiment with a universal phonology for both French and English and describe speech recognition results for the ATIS task using a combined phonology. Our best results so far show about 5% relative performance degradation for English relative to a purely English system with about twice the vocabulary size and a 9% relative degradation in French relative to a purely French system.
Cohen et al. (2002) studied this question.