Phonetic, syntactic and conceptual analysis driven speech recognition system and method

Abstract

A new approach to speech recognition that reacts to concepts conveyed through speech, which shifts the balance of power in speech recognition from straight sound recognition and statistical models to a more powerful and complete approach determining and addressing conveyed concepts. A probabilistically unbiased multi-phoneme recognition process is employed, followed by a phoneme stream analysis process that builds the list of candidate words derived from recognized phonemes, followed by a permutation analysis process that produces sequences of candidate words with high potential of being syntactically valid, and finally, by processing targeted syntactic sequences in a conceptual analysis process to generate the utterance's conceptual representation that can be used to produce an adequate response. Applications include improving accuracy or automatically generating punctuation for transcription and dictation, word or concept spotting in audio streams, concept spotting in electronic text, customer support, call routing and other command / response scenarios.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present application is a division of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 610,080, filed Jun. 30, 2003, the entirety of which is expressly incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]The present invention relates generally to speech processing. More specifically, the invention relates to speech processing used by humans and interpreted by machines where speech content is restricted only by concepts conveyed instead of syntactic related constraints.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]Speech recognition is defined as the process allowing humans to interact with machines by using speech. Scientists have worked for years to develop the capability for machines to understand human speech. The applications of this capability are obvious. People can interface with machines through speech, as opposed to the cryptic command inputs that are the norm with today's personal computers, telephony devices, embedded devices and other programmable machinery. ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]The system and method of this invention provides a natural language speech recognition process allowing a machine to recognize human speech, conceptually analyze that speech so that the machine can “understand” it and provide an adequate response. The approach of this invention does not rely on word spotting, context-free grammars or other single-phoneme based techniques to “recognize” digitized audio signals representative of the speech input and consequently does not probabilistically bias the pattern recognition algorithm applied to compare stored phonemes profiles in each cluster with the audio data. Instead the approach of this invention is to recognize multiple, sometimes alternative, phonemes in the digitized audio signals; build words through streaming analysis, syntactically validate sequences of words through syntactic analysis, and finally, analyze selected syntactically valid sequences of words through conceptual analysis. The invention may utilize some methods related to artificial intelligence and, more specifically, recurrent neural networks and conceptual dependency to achieve these objectives. By conceptually analyzing the speech input, the machine can “understand” and respond adequately to that input. In addition, the invention is applicable to speakers of different accents and intonations by using clusters.

[0016]One advantage of the system and method of the invention is that it does not require a predefined syntax from the speaker to be observed in order for a command to be recognized successfully. Another advantage is that systems implementing this method do not require a sound input with high sampling rate in order to be analyzed successfully; for example, telephony systems can function more efficiently with this method than prior art approaches. This indeed significantly improves the balance of power in speech recognition by inserting a process where concepts conveyed have some weight in the recognition task; in contradiction to prior art approaches where emphasis is put on straight sound recognition.

[0021]ii. provide a method that combines artificial intelligence and recurrent neural networks with phoneme recognition and Conceptual Dependency that allows a machine to conceptually “understand” a digitized audio data sample.

[0022]iii. provide a method of conceptual speech recognition that allows a machine to formulate an adequate response to a digitized audio data sample based on the machine's conceptual “understanding” of the input.

[0030]xi. provide a system and method that can generate punctuation in existing dictation systems so punctuation marks do not have to be read into dictation, allowing the user to speak more naturally.

[0031]xii. provide a system and method that can enhance recognition accuracy of existing dictation systems.

Problems solved by technology

This time-consuming process frustrates, and even sometimes discourages the user, and increases the cost for the information provider.

Such techniques typically force users to adapt their behavior by limiting their vocabulary, forcing them to learn commands that are recognized by the system or having them react to prompts taking significant time before the information of interest to them is communicated.

For example, many speech recognition applications cannot recognize spoken words that do not match the stored acoustic information due to particular pronunciation of that word by the speaker.

Such an approach cannot be used, however, for the casual user of a speech recognition system, since spending time to train the system would not be acceptable.

Typically, in prior art approaches, too much emphasis is put on straight sound recognition instead of recognizing speech as a whole, where syntax is used exclusively to build a concept and the concept itself is used in order to produce an adequate response.

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