1977/12/01 by Dennis H. Klatt · 1 citation
Computer Science · Psychology · #Speech and dialogue systems #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Computer science #Lexicon #Set (abstract data type) #Word (group theory) #Speech recognition #Perception #Agency (philosophy) #Natural language processing #Artificial intelligence #Linguistics #Psychology #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1121/1.381666
openalex publication_date 1977/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In September of 1976, four speech understanding systems were demonstrated, signifying the end of a five-year program of research and development sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The best performance was displayed by the Harpy system developed at Carnegie–Mellon University. Harpy satisfied a set of design goals that were specified at the beginning of the program, including the gal of understanding over 90% of a set of naturally spoken sentences composed from a 1000-word lexicon. After defining the nature of the speech understanding problem, the four systems are described and critically evaluated. Based on this review, a structure for a next-generation speech understanding system is proposed and parts of it are considered as a possible model of the early stages of speech perception. The perceptual model addresses the issue of lexical access and includes a decoding network composed of expected spectral sequences for all word strings of English.