Influence of Highly Inflected Word Forms and Acoustic Background on the Robustness of Automatic Speech Recognition for Human–Computer Interaction

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition is essential for establishing natural communication with a human–computer interface. Speech recognition accuracy strongly depends on the complexity of language. Highly inflected word forms are a type of unit present in some languages. The acoustic background presents an additional important degradation factor influencing speech recognition accuracy. While the acoustic background has been studied extensively, the highly inflected word forms and their combined influence still present a major research challenge. Thus, a novel type of analysis is proposed, where a dedicated speech database comprised solely of highly inflected word forms is constructed and used for tests. Dedicated test sets with various acoustic backgrounds were generated and evaluated with the Slovenian UMB BN speech recognition system. The baseline word accuracy of 93.88% and 98.53% was reduced to as low as 23.58% and 15.14% for the various acoustic backgrounds. The analysis shows that the word accuracy degradation depends on and changes with the acoustic background type and level. The highly inflected word forms’ test sets without background decreased word accuracy from 93.3% to only 63.3% in the worst case. The impact of highly inflected word forms on speech recognition accuracy was reduced with the increased levels of acoustic background and was, in these cases, similar to the non-highly inflected test sets. The results indicate that alternative methods in constructing speech databases, particularly for low-resourced Slovenian language, could be beneficial.