Recognizing unseen words

[Qianchu L]

Hi

Just need some clarification here. Is a continuous speech recognition system able to recognize unseen words that are not in the dictionary? Or, will it always recognize the unseen words as generated by the nearest word model which exists in the dictionary?

Thank you!

[Simon]

No, in general Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have a fixed vocabulary and therefore, as you correctly state, any out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words would be recognised as similar-sounding in-vocabulary words (or, more likely, as a sequence of short words).

It is possible to build an open-vocabulary system, but this is somewhat unusual. The vast majority of ASR systems that you will read about in the literature have a fixed vocabulary.

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