SPEAKER ADAPTATION OF VOCABULARY FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION

• US 20080215326A1
• Filed: 04/18/2008
• Published: 09/04/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 12/16/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Rajput, Nitendra, Verma, Ashish
• Granted Patent: US 8,046,224 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/251
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/07 to the speaker
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 17/02 Preprocessing operations, e.g. segment selection; Pattern representation or modelling, e.g. based on linear discriminant analysis [LDA] or principal components; Feature selection or extraction

Abstract

A phonetic vocabulary for a speech recognition system is adapted to a particular speaker'"'"'s pronunciation. A speaker can be attributed specific pronunciation styles, which can be identified from specific pronunciation examples. Consequently, a phonetic vocabulary can be reduced in size, which can improve recognition accuracy and recognition speed.

Claims

1. A computer system for speaker adaptation of vocabulary for a speech recognition system, the computer system comprising:

means for attributing a pronunciation style to the speaker, based upon the identified pronunciation; and

means for restricting a vocabulary used in the speech recognition system to pronunciations consistent with the attributed pronunciation style.

3. The computer system of as claimed in claim 1, further comprising a component operable for recording an enrollment text, including predetermined keywords, read by the speaker.

4. The computer system as claimed in claim 3, wherein the keywords are representative of words having a phonetically similar baseform.

5. The computer system as claimed in claim 3, wherein the keywords are representative of words having alternative pronunciations that are indicative of a likely pronunciation of similarly categorized words of the speaker.

6. The computer system as claimed in claim 5, wherein the step of attributing a pronunciation style is based upon the pronunciation of the keywords of the speaker recorded in the enrollment text.

7. The computer system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the step of attributing a pronunciation style is based upon the pronunciation of predetermined keywords of the speaker.

2. Computer software, recorded on a medium, for vocabulary adaptation for a speech recognition system, the computer software comprising:

software code means for attributing a pronunciation style to the speaker, based upon the identified pronunciation; and

software code means for restricting a vocabulary used in the speech recognition system to pronunciations consistent with the attributed pronunciation style.