Repairing false starts in the automatic recognition of spontaneous speech

A primary difference between spontaneous speech and read speech concerns the use of false starts, where a speaker interrupts the flow of speech to restart an utterance. The acoustic and distributional aspects of such restarts in a widely-used speech database are examined. Identifying the nature and extent of the restart in such cases could improve the performance of an automatic speech recognizer, by allowing the elimination from consideration of some hypotheses based on spectral analysis. Results are given which allow identification of many restarts