Detection and transcription of new words

This paper describes a model which enables a speech recognition system to automatically detect new words and to provide a rough phonetic transcription. In our approach to the new word problem the decision whether new words occurred in the speech input is not based exclusively on acoustic evidence but also on a language model designed to support the detection of new words. We describe preliminary experiments to create new word grammars on the Wall Street Journal task. Furthermore we present recognition results of our new word model using the recognition engine of the JANUS speech to speech translation system [1, 2], designed around the task of conference registration.