The task of a speech recogniser is to transcribe human speech into text. To do so, modern
recognisers rely firmly on the principles of statistical pattern recognition. This statistical
framework allows the problem of speech recognition to be decomposed into a set of well-
defined sub-tasks, namely the extraction of the relevant features from the acoustic signal, the
statistical modelling of the acoustic and linguistic knowledge, and the combination of all
information in an efficient search for the most probable sentence. As is indicated in the title …