Improvements in beam search for 10000-word continuous-speech recognition

The authors describe the improvements in a time-synchronous beam search strategy for a 10000-word continuous-speech recognition task. Basically they introduced two measures, namely a tree organization of the pronunciation lexicon and a novel look-ahead technique at the phoneme level. The experimental tests performed showed that the number of state hypotheses could be reduced from 50000 to 3000, i.e., by a factor of about 17. At the same time, the word error rate did not increase.