A category based approach for recognition of out-of-vocabulary words

In almost all applications of automatic speech recognition, especially in spontaneous speech tasks, the recognizer vocabulary cannot cover all occurring words. There is always a significant amount of out-of-vocabulary words even when the vocabulary size is very large. We present a new approach for the integration of out-of-vocabulary words into statistical language models. We use category information for all words in the training corpus to define a function that gives an approximation of the out-of-vocabulary word emission probability for each word category. This information is integrated into the language models. Although we use a simple acoustic model for out-of-vocabulary words, we achieve a 6% reduction of word error rate on spontaneous speech data with about 5% out-of-vocabulary rate