Jean-Luc Cochard
Philippe Langlas
Gerard Chollet
IDIAP Institute Dalle Molle d'intelligence artificielle perceptive), CP 609, CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland
ETC[sub verif] a speech processing environment under development at IDIAP, serves as a testbed for experimental design issues in the development of robust and efficient speech recognition applications. This works stems from the strong intuition that a probable solution to the general problem of speech understanding lies in the development of a system able to deal cooperatively with a large set of distinct, partial and even unreliable problem solvers, namely HMMs, NNs, APD (acoustic phonetic decoder), prosodic analyzers, and parsers. This paper will present the general architecture of ETC[sub verif] focusing upon the main properties of ETC (environment for cooperative treatment). In particular, the core of the system is devoted to execution scheduling of speech and language processing modules; communication and negotiation over partial, compatible but not unifiable results. The design decisions regarding the requirements of cooperation between (modules such as) phonetic HMMs, an APD with lexical access and a bottom-up parser will be described as part of a prototype of speech recognition presently under realization. [Work supported by the Swiss National Funds for Scientific Research.]