Multilingual large vocabulary speech recognition: the European SQALE project

Abstract This paper describes the S qale project in which the ARPA large vocabulary evaluation paradigm was adapted to meet the needs of European multilingual speech recognition development. It involved establishing a framework for sharing training and test materials, defining common protocols for training and testing systems, developing systems, running an evaluation and analysing the results. The specifically multilingual issues addressed included the impact of the language on corpora and test set design, transcription issues, evaluation metrics, recognition system design, cross-system and cross-language performance, and results analysis. The project started in December 1993 and finished in September 1995. The paper describes the evaluation framework and the results obtained. The overall conclusions of the project were that the same general approach to recognition system design is applicable to all the languages studied although there were some language specific problems to solve. It was found that the evaluation paradigm used within ARPA could be used within the European context with little difficulty and the consequent sharing amongst the sites of training and test materials and language-specific expertise was highly beneficial.