Speech and Speech Recognition during Dictation Corrections

Keith Vertanen

Interspeech '06: Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2006.

A natural way to correct errors made while dictating to a computer is to respeak portions of the original sentence. But often spoken corrections are themselves misrecognized, costing the user time and testing their patience. To better understand how users behave while correcting, I created a simulated dictation interface and fooled users into believing they were correcting errors by respeaking. I found that users not only hyperarticulate during corrections, but they do so preemptively before any misrecognition. Depending on the recognizer, hyperarticulation was found to cause relatively minor changes in error rate. The correction of isolated words or phrases was more troublesome, causing substantial recognition problems for an HTK recognizer. Dragon Naturally Speaking, on the other hand, performed slightly better on hyperarticulated speech and only degraded slightly on isolated corrections.

There are more details about this research in chapter 3 of my thesis.