Refinement of a Structured Language Model

A new language model for speech recognition inspired by linguistic analysis is presented. The model develops hidden hierarchical structure incrementally and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history — thus enabling the use of extended distance dependencies — in an attempt to complement the locality of currently used n-gram Markov models. The model,its probabilistic parametrization, a reestimation algorithm for the model parameters and a set of experiments meant to evaluate its potential for speech recognition are presented.