Computer Program to Aid in the Selection and Evaluation of Vocabularies for Word Recognizers

The performance of a word recognizer depends upon the vocabulary that it attempts to recognize. A computer program has been written to aid in the selection and evaluation of vocabularies for word recognizers. The program operates by predicting the performance of a given recognizer on a given vocabulary. The words in the vocabulary are treated as strings of phonemes, and it is assumed that the word recognizer being evaluated operates in terms of such strings. The program searches the vocabulary for word pairs that would be confused with each other if the recognizer were unable to make certain discriminations. When a confusable pair is found, it may be added to a list of confusions for later printing, or one word of the pair may be deleted from the vocabulary. The latter mode of operation results in a reduced vocabulary on which the recognizer should perform well. Results are presented for a vocabulary of about 1000 common words.