Czech belongs to the family of Slavic languages, which exhibit phenomena that will prove challenging to speech recognition. The characteristics of a high degree of inflection, a high degree of derivation, a relatively free word order, and having phones that appear in no other language make speech recognition difficult. The development of a large vocabulary speaker independent continuous speech recognizer for Czech is proposed as a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins' Center for Language and Speech Processing and three university teams from the Czech Republic. The proposed research is attempting to take advantage of the synergistic opportunities offered by the experience and tools of Johns Hopkins researchers, by the capabilities of the Czech partners, and by the existence of extensive text resources in their possession. The research cooperation will forge international scientific ties and create new centers of language engineering excellence outside the United States.
