Abstract

Many speech applications, most prominently telephone directory assistance, require the recognition of proper names. However, the recognition of increasingly large sets of spoken names is difficult: Besides technical limitations, very large recognition vocabularies contain many easily confused words or even homophones. Therefore, proper names are often spelled or both spoken and spelled. In this paper we compare the performance for proper name recognition when a name is spoken only, spelled only, or both spoken and spelled. In the latter case, information about the same name is provided in two different representations. We address methods to exploit this redundancy and propose techniques to handle the recognition of large lists of spoken and spelled proper names. 5 th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (EUROSPEECH '97) Rhodes, Greece, September 22-25, 1997 1. SPOKEN AND SPELLED NAMES 1.1. Scenarios In what contexts do people speak and spell names? Three scena...

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