INTRODUCTION OF THE METI PROJECT
"DEVELOPMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL SPEECH RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY"

Sadaoki Furui(1) and Tetsunori Kobayashi(2)

(1) Tokyo Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science
(2) Waseda University, Department of Computer Science

Waseda University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and six companies, 
Asahi-kasei, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Oki and Toshiba, initiated a three 
year project in 2006 supported by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and 
Trade (METI), Japan, for jointly developing fundamental automatic speech 
recognition (ASR) technology.  The project focuses on utilizing ASR 
technology in car and home environments.  Seven subtasks are being 
investigated: speech/non-speech separation using multiple microphones, 
speech/non-speech separation for a single audio stream, developing a 
high-performance WFST-based decoder, multi-lingual ASR modeling, 
higher-order language modeling, developing a system for assisting speech 
interface development, and overall technology evaluation.  This talk will 
give an overview of the intermediate technological progress achieved by the 
project.