The Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen

This paper describes the "Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen" environment which has the goals to promote community sharing of research techniques, foster innovative experimentation, and provide solid reference systems as a tool for education, research, and evaluation with a focus on, but not restricted to, speech and language research. The core of the research infrastructure is the use of Virtual Machines (VMs) that provide a consistent environment for experimentation. We liken the virtual machines to a "kitchen" because they provide the infrastructure into which one can install "appliances" (e.g., speech recognition tool-kits), "recipes" (scripts for creating state-of-the art systems), and "ingredients" (language data). A web-based community platform complements the VMs, to allow physically disconnected users to jointly explore VMs, learn from each other, and collaborate in research. In this demo, we present initial VMs that were mostly used for teaching classes at Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State University, and solicit feedback for an initial "hub"-style web-site.