Understanding Spontaneous Speech

When speech understanding systems are used in real applications, they will have to deal with phenomena peculiar to spontaneous speech. People use language differently when they speak than when they write. Spoken language contains many interjections, filled pauses, etc. Speakers often don't use well-formed sentences. They speak in phrases, have restarts, etc. Systems designed for written or read text will encounter serious difficulties processing such input. This paper outlines our strategy for dealing with spontaneous spoken input in a speech recognition system.