´Early recognition´ of words in continuous speech

In this paper, we present an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a computational model of human speech recognition - SpeM - that is capable of computing ´word activations´ during the recognition process, in addition to doing normal speech recognition, a task in which conventional ASR architectures only provide output after the end of an utterance. We explain the notion of word activation and show that it can be used for ´early recognition´, i.e. recognising a word before the end of the word is available. Our ASR system was tested on 992 continuous speech utterances, each containing at least one target word: a city name of at least two syllables. The results show that early recognition was obtained for 72.8% of the target words that were recognised correctly. Also, it is shown that word activation can be used as an effective confidence measure.