Recognition of spoken and spelled proper names

Many speech applications, most prominently telephone directory assistance, require the recognition of proper names. However, the recognition of increasingly large sets of spoken names is di cult: Besides technical limitations, very large recognition vocabularies contain many easily confused words or even homophones. Therefore, proper names are often spelled or both spoken and spelled. In this paper we compare the performance for proper name recognition when a name is spoken only, spelled only, or both spoken and spelled. In the latter case, information about the same name is provided in two di erent representations. We address methods to exploit this redundancy and propose techniques to handle the recognition of large lists of spoken and spelled proper names. 1. SPOKEN AND SPELLED NAMES