Speech recognition of a natural text read as isolated words

This paper describes the results of an experiment in which we have applied our speech recognition system to the problem of recognizing sentences from our restricted laser-patent corpus when the sentences are read with pauses between the words. Except for changes to the phonology and the training data, nothing has been done to adapt the system to isolated word recognition. On 20 sentences a word error rate of 3.1% was obtained. This compares with 8.7% for the same sentences when spoken continuously by the same talker.