RELEASE_NOTES

Sphinx-4 Speech Recognition System

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Version:       1.0Beta6
Release Date:  March 2011

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New Features and Improvements:

 * SRGS/GrXML support, more to come soon with support for JSAPI2
 * Model layout is unified with Pocketsphinx/Sphinxtrain
 * Netbeans project files are included
 * Language models can be loaded from URI
 * Batch testing application allows testing inside Sphinxtrain

Bug Fixes:

 * Flat linguist accuracy issue fixed
 * Intelligent sorting in paritioner fixes stack overflow when tokens
 have identical scores
 * Various bug fixes
    
Thanks:

  Timo Bauman, Nasir Hussain, Michele Alessandrini, Evandro Goueva,
  Stephen Marquard, Larry A. Taylor, Yuri Orlov, Dirk Schnelle-Walka,
  James Chivers, Firas Al Khalil

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Version:       1.0Beta5
Release Date:  August 2010

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New Features and Improvements:

    * Alignment demo and grammar to align long speech recordings to 
      transcription and get word times
    * Lattice grammar for multipass decoding
    * Explicit-backoff in LexTree linguist
    * Significant LVCSR speedup with proper LexTree compression
    * Simple filter to drop zero energy frames
    * Graphviz for grammar dump vizualization instead of AISee
    * Voxforge decoding accuracy test
    * Lattice scoring speedup
    * JSAPI-free JSGF parser

Bug Fixes:

    * Insertion probabilities are counted in lattice scores
    * Don't waste resources and memory on dummy acoustic model
      transformations
    * Small DMP files are loaded properly
    * JSGF parser fixes
    * Documentation improvements
    * Debian package stuff
    
Thanks:

    Antoine Raux, Marek Lesiak, Yaniv Kunda, Brian Romanowski, Tony
    Robinson, Bhiksha Raj, Timo Baumann, Michele Alessandrini, Francisco
    Aguilera, Peter Wolf, David Huggins-Daines, Dirk Schnelle-Walka.

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Version:       1.0Beta4
Release Date:  February 2010

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New Features and Improvements:

    * Large arbitrary-order language models
    * Simplified and reworked model loading code
    * Raw configuration and and demos
    * HTK model loader
    * A lot of code optimizations
    * JSAPI-independent JSGF parser
    * Noise filtering components
    * Lattice rescoring
    * Server-based language model

Bug fixes:

    * Lots of bug fixes: PLP extraction, race-conditions
    in scoring, etc.
    
Thanks:

    Peter Wolf, Yaniv Kunda, Antoine Raux, Dirk Schnelle-Walka,
    Yannick Estève, Anthony Rousseau and LIUM team, Christophe Cerisara.

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Version:       1.0Beta3
Release Date:  August 2009

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New Features and Improvements:

    * BatchAGC frontend component
    * Completed transition to defaults in annotations
    * ConcatFeatureExtrator to cooperate with cepwin models
    * End of stream signals are passed to the decoder to fix cancellation
    * Timer API improvement
    * Threading policy is changed to TAS

Bug fixes:

    * Fixes reading UTF-8 from language model dump.
    * Huge memory optimization of the lattice compression
    * More stable fronend work with DataStart and DataEnd and optional
      SpeechStart/SpeechEnd
    
Thanks:

    Yaniv Kunda, Michele Alessandrini, Holger Brandl, Timo Baumann,
    Evandro Gouvea

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Version:       1.0Beta2
Release Date:  February 2009

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New Features and Improvments:

    * new much cleaner and more robust configuration system
    * migrated to java5
    * xml-free instantiation of new systems
    * improved feature extraction (better voice activity detection, many bugfixes)
	* Cleaned up some of the core APIs
    * include-tag for configuration files 
    * better JavaSound support
	* fully qualified grammar names in JSGF (Roger Toenz)
	* support for dictionary addenda in the FastDictionary (Gregg Liming)
	* added batch tools for measuring performance on NIST corpus with CTL files
	* many perforamnce and stability improvments


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Version:       1.0Beta
Release Date:  September 2004

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New Features:

    * Confidence scoring
    * Posterior probability computation
    * Sausage creation from a lattice
    * Dynamic grammars
    * Narrow bandwidth acoustic model
    * Out-of-grammar utterance rejection
    * More demonstration programs
    * WSJ5K Language model

Improvements:

    * Better control over microphone selection
    * JSGF limitations removed
    * Improved performance for large, perplex JSGF grammars
    * Added Filler support for JSGF Grammars
    * Ability to configure microphone input
    * Added ECMAScript Action Tags support and demos.

Bug fixes:

    * Lots of bug fixes

Documentation:
    
    * Added the Sphinx-4 FAQ
    * Added scripts and instructions for building a WSJ5k language model
    from LDC data.

Thanks:

    * Peter Gorniak, Willie Walker, Philip Kwok, Paul Lamere

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Version:       0.1alpha
Release Date:  June 2004

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Initial release