Automatic generation of statistical language models for interactive voice response applications
First Claim
1. A method for generating a database of acceptable utterances for use in a speech recognition system, said method comprising:
- accepting semantic categories and task descriptions defined by text descriptions;
outputting, based on an accepted one of said categories and description, said category a list of potential utterances that may be spoken by a user to select said one category; and
training a SLM for an ASR system based on said potential utterances.
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Abstract
A Statistical Language Model (SLM) that can be used in an ASR for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems in general and Natural Language Speech Applications (NLSAs) in particular can be created by first manually producing a brief description in text for each task that can be performed in an NLSA. These brief descriptions are then analyzed, in one embodiment, to generate spontaneous speech utterances based pre-filler patterns and a skeletal set of content words. The pre-filler patterns are in turn used with Part-of-Speech (POS) tagged conversations from a spontaneous speech corpus to generate a set of pre-filler phrases. The skeletal set of content words is used with an electronic lexico-semantic database and with a thesaurus-based content word extraction process to generate a more extensive list of content words. The pre-filler phrases and content words set, thus generated, are combined into utterances using a lexico-semantic resource based process. In one embodiment, a lexico-semantic statistical validation process is used to correct and/or add the automatically generated utterances to the database of expected utterances. The system requires a minimum amount of human intervention and no prior knowledge regarding the expected user utterances, and the WWW is used to validate the word models. The system requires a minimum amount of human intervention and no prior knowledge regarding the expected user utterances in response to a particular prompt.
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Citations
26 Claims
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1. A method for generating a database of acceptable utterances for use in a speech recognition system, said method comprising:
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accepting semantic categories and task descriptions defined by text descriptions; outputting, based on an accepted one of said categories and description, said category a list of potential utterances that may be spoken by a user to select said one category; and training a SLM for an ASR system based on said potential utterances.
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2. A method for generating a database of acceptable utterance for use in a speech recognition system comprising, said generating occurring without human intervention, said method comprising:
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establishing part of speech (POS) patterns for a given prompt; expanding said POS patterns into possible pre-filler phrases for spontaneous speech; and eliminating from said possible pre-filler phrases those phrases with a high probability of being inappropriate for said given prompt. - View Dependent Claims (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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11. A method of automatically establishing a set of SLMs for use in an IVR system, said method comprising:
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generating for a given IVR prompt an expanded set of possible pre-filler POS phrases based upon manually extracted POS patterns from a relatively small sample of semantic category descriptions; eliminating inappropriate phrases from said generated set to establish a first level set of POS phrases; combining each first level pre-filler phases with a skeletal set of content words and with a list of closely related words to form alternative utterances; and filtering said utterances to achieve a final set of SLMs. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)
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18. A system for automatically establishing a set of SLMs for use in an IVR system, said system comprising:
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means for generating for a given IVR prompt an expanded set of possible pre-filler POS phrases based upon manually extracted POS patterns; means for eliminating inappropriate phrases from said generated set of phrases; means for combining said expanded set of possible pre-filler phrases with a skeletal set of words to form utterances; and means for filtering said utterances to achieve a final set of SLMs. - View Dependent Claims (19, 20, 21, 22)
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23. A computer program for automatically establishing a set of SLMs for use in an IVR system, said program comprising:
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code for generating for a given IVR prompt an expanded set of possible pre-filler POS phrases based upon manually extracted POS patterns; code for eliminating inappropriate phrases from said generated set of phrases; code for combining said expanded set of possible pre-filler phrases with a skeletal set of words to form utterances; and code for filtering said utterances to achieve a final set of SLMs. - View Dependent Claims (24, 25, 26)
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Specification