Speech recognition and retrieval using unsupervised sub-word language models February 9, 2008

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Google Tech Talks
February, 8 2008

ABSTRACT

Unsupervised morpheme analysis and language models developed at
Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) open interesting new views on
large vocabulary speech recognition, information retrieval and machine
translation.
This approach learns suitable sub-word units directly from relevant
text corpora in a completely data-driven manner and can, thus, be
easily ported to various morphologically complex languages.
Our system includes several public domain software packages: Morfessor
for determining the modeling units, VariKN to train effectively
smoothed long-span LMs, a near-realtime single-pass decoder for LMs
and LVCSR, and demos at:
http://www.cis.hut.fi/projects/morpho/
http://www.cis.hut.fi/projects/speech/

I will also summarize the results from the recent Morpho Challenge
machine learning competitions in morpheme analysis for language
modeling and information retrieval:
http://www.cis.hut.fi/morphochallenge2007/

Speaker: Mikko Kurimo
Mikko Kurimo is currently Academy Research Fellow at Helsinki
University of Technology (TKK), where he was an acting professor of
Computer and Information Science (2001-2003). In 1998-2000 he worked as a postdoc at IDIAP and his Doctor of Science (PhD) degree is from TKK 1997. He has a long research record and a number of publications in large
vocabulary speech recognition (since 1990) and has been involved in several
international and national research projects and is TKK's site manager
in the FP6 Network of Excellence PASCAL.
At TKK's Adaptive Informatics Research Centre (which is one of the Centres
of
Excellence nominated by the Academy of Finland) he leads the Speech
Recognition and Multimodal Interfaces research groups.
The current research focus of his speech group is in language independent
and unsupervised models for continuous speech with morpheme-based
language models for very large vocabulary.
The relevant pilot applications in the group range from unlimited
vocabulary dictation systems for different languages to audio indexing
and speech-to-speech translation.
At the moment Mikko Kurimo is an International Fellow at SRI until
February 2008.