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4.2.1 Network Decoding: Command Line Options and Arguments

Virtually all of our significant speech recognition functionality is encapsulated in a single program, called isip_recognize. This program has many options, arguments, and modes. In this section, we discuss those options that are relevant to network decoding.

For a general discussion of our command line interface, see our foundation class documentation on utilities. This will teach you the basics about how command line parameters are parsed, and explain some general options that are available to all utilities (e.g., -debug).

To get started, execute the command "isip_recognize -help". You will obtain a list of the most important available options, including the ones discussed in this section.

isip221_[1]: isip_recognize -help

For a more detailed explanation of the isip_recognize utility, visit its manual page.

Many options are common to all of our tools. Options such as -debug, -help, and -version have obvious purposes and are used for every tool. The help messages usually omit these options since they are so common. Other options such as -directory, -extension, -preserve, etc. are explained in Section 3.3.2 for isip_transform. Clicking on one of these options above will link you to the option's desciption in that section. The CommandLine class is responsible for reserving these option names. For a more complete description of the CommandLine class, click here. The purpose of this section is to explain and demonstrate each of the options that are unique to isip_recognize. The option's explanation will be followed by an example in order to further demonstrate the purpose of each option.

Option: -output_file

The desired output filename can be specified. This example directs the output into a file named out.tmp instead of hypo.out which is set in our parameter file, params_decode.sof.

isip_recognize -verbose ALL -parameter_file params_decode.sof -output_file out.tmp -list identifiers.sof

The screen output will be:

Note that if the output filename is not set, either in the parameter file or on by -output_file, the output WILL NOT be saved in a file.

Option: -output_format

This tells isip_recognize to generate output as either a DATABASE, or a NIST_SCORE format. For instance:

isip_recognize -output_file out.tmp -output_format DATABASE -parameter_file params_decode.sof -list identifiers.sof

The command will generate the file out_datab.tmp. Open this file and confirm that its format is Sof database.

This is isip_recognize's default format. The annotation graph format has not yet been implemented. It will be invoked by:

isip_recognize -output_format SOF -parameter_file params_decode.sof -list identifiers.sof

Option: -output_mode

The output_mode option sets the output mode specification and can be FILE, LIST, or TRANSFORM.

FILE: outputs hypotheses to a single output file, and is the default option

isip_recognize -output_mode FILE -output_file out.tmp -parameter_file params_decode.sof -list identifiers.sof

This sets the output mode to FILE and puts the output into out.tmp.

The screen output will be:
The FILE mode is the default output mode for isip_recognize.
LIST: outputs each hypothesis to a different file in a list specified using the option -output_list. In the example below, the file list.sof contains a list of two files. The hypotheses for both utterances will be placed in a seperate file. Run the command below:
This command will generate two files: out_list1.tmp and out_list2.tmp. Make sure that the number of output files in your list matches the number of utterances you are decoding.
TRANSFORM: outputs each hypothesis as a Sof file and puts the output in a directory specified by -directory If -directory is not set, the output will, by default, be placed in the same directory as the input features. The output filename will match the feature file name and inckude a "_0" suffix. In other words, if one utterance to be decoded is "data/bg_1647a.sof" its output will be "data/bg_1647a_0.sof". This example will define -directory. Run the command
This command generates the two files ah_954a.sof, ah_o321oo7a.sof.
Option: -verify

The -verify option allows the checks the configuration of isip_recognize, but does not actually process each utterance. When -verify is used, isip_recognize checks that each specified configuration is in place and that all of the data files exist.

This example verifies that all parameters are correct and that files exist:
Option: -verbosity

This option controls the amount of screen output that is generated. Controlling the output is helpful when configuring and tweaking parameters. The examples below show how the different -verbosity levels affect the screen output.

NONE:
This command does not generate any output. Also, if a verbosity level is not specified, no screen output will generated.

BRIEF:
Output:
Clearly, more output is generated. If a problem were to occur during the recognition process, the source of the problem would be easier to find.

ALL:
ALL produces the same amount of output as BRIEF.

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