METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENHANCED PHONETIC INDEXING AND SEARCH

• US 20140067373A1
• Filed: 09/03/2012
• Published: 03/06/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 09/03/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nice Ltd
• Original Assignee: Nice Systems Limited (Nice Ltd)
• Inventors: WASSERBLAT, Moshe, Eylon, Dan, Ashkenazi, Tzach, Pereg, Oren, Laperdon, Ronen
• Granted Patent: US 9,311,914 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/02 Feature extraction for speech recognition; Selection of recognition unit
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/04 Segmentation; Word boundary detection
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 2015/025 Phonemes, fenemes or fenones being the recognition units

Abstract

The subject matter discloses a method two phase phonetic indexing and search comprising: receiving a digital representation of an audio signal; producing a phonetic index of the audio signal; producing phonetic N-gram sequence from the phonetic index by segmenting the phonetic index into a plurality of phonetic N-grams; and producing an inverted index of the plurality of phonetic N-grams.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving a digital representation of an audio signal;

producing a phonetic index of the audio signal;

producing phonetic N-gram sequence from the phonetic index by segmenting the phonetic index into a plurality of phonetic N-grams; and

producing an inverted index of the plurality of phonetic N-grams.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the plurality of phonetic N-grams are of the same N-gram length.

3. The method according to claim 1, further comprises:

obtaining a textual search term;

converting the textual search term into a phonetic search term;

searching the phonetic search term on the inverted index.

4. The method according to claim 3, further comprises producing one or more segmented phonetic search terms from the phonetic search term, the segmented phonetic search terms having the same N-gram length as the plurality of phonetic N-grams;

producing a search query from the one or more segmented phonetic search terms; and

searching the search query on the inverted index.

5. The method according to claim 1, wherein the plurality of phonetic N-grams are of variable lengths.

6. The method according to claim 3, wherein receiving two or more digital representations of audio signals;

receiving one or more phonetic search terms; and

ranking the two or more digital representations of audio signals based on the searching of the one or more phonetic search terms on the inverted index.

7. The method according to claim 6, further comprises determining whether to perform a phonetic search or not on each audio signal, according to the determined rank.

8. The method according to claim 7, further comprises obtaining a limitation parameter;

and limiting the number of audio signals that are used for phonetic search according to the limitation parameter.

9. The method according to claim 3, further comprises determining whether to perform a phonetic search according to an accuracy estimation of the inverted index search.

10. The method according to claim 3, further comprises determining whether to perform a phonetic search according to the available processing resources of a device performing the search.

11. The method according to claim 3, further comprises obtaining an enable/disable parameter;

and determining whether to perform a phonetic search according to the enable/disable parameter.

12. The method according to claim 3, further comprises storing search results of the inverted index in a storage device.