title: Configuring Pocketsphinx properly
body: <p>I have been installing Pocketsphinx0.7 on a VM running Debian Squeeze. This worked fine and I can try to recognize speech from files.Having this I've built some python scripts which recognize a bunch of files I got and then estimating the word error rate. These use gstreamer as described in <a href="http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/gstreamer" rel="nofollow">this tutorial</a>.</p>
  
  <p>So far I am using the original hmm which was in the pocketsphinx tarball, a dictionary which simply contains the words from my test data and an optimized language model I got from my professor. This should work as it is also running in a production system. My problem now is that the recognition performance is still horrible. I have an word error (WER) rate of about 85%.  </p>
  
  <p>What I want to know is how I can improve the WER. What kind of steps can I take?</p>
  
  <p>Another thing that happens and probably impacts performance is that pocketsphinx tells me it has no permission to access the hmm although I made the hmm accessible for read,write and execute for everyone.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have an idea where this may come from?
  I' appreciate any kind of help. If you need more information please let me know. </p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I created a small testset and ran pocketsphinx. <a href="http://depositfiles.com/files/h9zo2xjdj" rel="nofollow">This is where you can find the files and the results.</a> I was allowed to give 
  you some examples from the original test set. You <a href="http://http://pastebin.com/KL2PqTi" rel="nofollow">can find it here</a>.<br>
  These are the worst examples. Short utterances of 1-2 words work well. 
  Sorry I couldn't create a big test set so far, my time is very limited.</p>