Speech research can be can be organized into these general areas:

• Speech Analysis (Production, Perception, Parameter Estimation)
• Speech Coding/Compression (CELP, MELP, ADPCM)
• Speech Synthesis (TTS)
• Speaker Identification/Recognition/Verification (Sprint, TI)
• Language Identification (Transparent Dialogue)
• Speech Recognition (Dragon, IBM, ATT)

Speech recognition can be further subdivided into these categories:

• Discrete/Connected/Continuous Speech/Word Spotting
• Speaker Dependent/Independent
• Small/Medium/Large/Unlimited Vocabulary

Put all this together, and you have one very long acronym:

Speaker-Independent Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition

or LVCSR for short :)