A feature-based filled pause detection system for Dutch

Nowadays, automatic speech recognizers have become quite good in recognizing well prepared fluent speech (e.g. news readings). However, the recognition of unprepared or spontaneous speech is still problematic. Some important reasons for this are that spontaneous speech is less articulated, exhibits a high speaking rate and usually contains a lot of disfluencies. The latter occur when the speaker needs time to think about the continuation of his discourse, or when he needs to change/correct his last utterance. Although there are different types of disfluencies (interruptions, corrections, repetitions, etc.) the most common ones are filled pauses. They can take the form of an interjection like /uh/ or /uhm/, or an abnormal lengthening of one syllable of a word. In this paper we propose a new method for detecting such fillers prior to the speech recognition. Tests show that it is possible to improve the recognition accuracy by just removing the detected filled pauses from the recognizer input.