Japanese LVCSR on the spontaneous scheduling task with JANUS-3

This paper presents our findings during the development of the recognition engine for the Japanese part of the VERBMOBIL speech-to-speech translation project. We describe an efficient method to bootstrap a large vocabulary speech recognizer for spontaneously spoken Japanese speech from a German recognizer and show that the amount of effort in developing the system could be reduced by using this rapid cross language bootstrapping technique. The Japanese recognizer is integrated into the VERBMOBIL system and shows very promising results achieving 9.3% word error rate. 1. INTRODUCTION The overall goal of the first phase of the VERBMOBIL project is to build a speech-to-speech translation system from both German and Japanese spontaneously spoken input speech to English, German and Japanese output in an appointment scenario 1. The Japanese recognizer described in this paper is beeing designed to be part of this translation system. Unlike Japanese dictation systems 2 there is no need fo...