PHRASE-BASED DIALOGUE MODELING WITH PARTICULAR APPLICATION TO CREATING RECOGNITION GRAMMARS FOR VOICE-CONTROLLED USER INTERFACES

• US 20160104481A1
• Filed: 12/18/2015
• Published: 04/14/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 05/28/1999
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC (NantWorks, LLC)
• Original Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC (NantWorks, LLC)
• Inventors: EHSANI, FARZAD, KNODT, EVA M.
• Granted Patent: US 10,552,533 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/211 Syntactic parsing, e.g. based on context-free grammar [CFG] or unification grammars
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/216 using statistical methods
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/247 Thesauruses; Synonyms
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/279 Recognition of textual entities
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/289 Phrasal analysis, e.g. finite state techniques or chunking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/35 Discourse or dialogue representation
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/005 Language recognition
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/183 using context dependencies, e.g. language models
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/193 Formal grammars, e.g. finite state automata, context free grammars or word networks
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/197 Probabilistic grammars, e.g. word n-grams
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/22 Procedures used during a speech recognition process, e.g. man-machine dialogue

Abstract

The invention enables creation of grammar networks that can regulate, control, and define the content and scope of human-machine interaction in natural language voice user interfaces (NLVUI). More specifically, the invention concerns a phrase-based modeling of generic structures of verbal interaction and use of these models for the purpose of automating part of the design of such grammar networks.

Claims

1-69. -69. (canceled)

70. A speech recognition computer system comprising:

an acoustic signal analyzer that generates acoustic features from a digital speech signal representing spoken input;

at least one recognition grammar specifying legitimate word sequences representing abstract meaning from alternative phrase variants of a language;

a phonetic dictionary having phonetic transcriptions of acoustic features; and

an acoustic decoder coupled with the acoustic signal analyzer, the recognition grammar, and the phonetic dictionary and that;

computes a set of most probable word hypotheses based on the acoustic features from the digital speech signal and the phonetic transcriptions in the phonetic dictionary;

constrains the word hypotheses to a narrowed set of commands according to the abstract meaning of the legitimate word sequences from the recognition grammar; and

provides the narrowed set of commands to a natural language processing component that translates the narrowed set of commands to a formalized set of instructions that can be processed by an application.

71. The system of claim 70, wherein the acoustic signal analyzer is configured to obtain the digital speech signal from a microphone.

72. The system of claim 70, wherein the acoustic signal analysis is configured to obtain a speech signal from a telephone.

73. The system of claim 70, further comprising a speech recognition front end that comprises the acoustic signal analyzer, the acoustic decoder, the recognition grammar, and the phonetic dictionary.

74. The system of claim 70, wherein the legitimate word sequences of the recognition grammar comprise a set of legitimate variations.

75. The system of claim 70, wherein the legitimate word sequences comprise a total set of user commands that are expected for a context.

76. The system of claim 70, wherein the recognition grammar comprises a recognition grammar network.

77. The system of claim 70, wherein the at least one recognition grammar includes at least two recognition grammars.

78. The system of claim 77, wherein the each of the at least two recognition grammars is based on different languages.

79. The system of claim 70, wherein the at least one recognition grammar models interactions across different contexts.

80. The system of claim 70, wherein the at least one recognition grammar models interactions across different domains.

81. The system of claim 70, wherein the acoustic decoder is further configured to trigger a request for clarification from a user for a command not specified within the recognition grammar.

82. The system of claim 70, wherein the narrowed set of commands includes text commands.

83. The system of claim 70, further comprising the natural language processing component.

84. The system of claim 83, further comprising a dialog manager that receives the narrowed set of commands from the natural language processing component and generates a response.

85. The system of claim 84, further comprising a speech output back end that generates a verbal system response based on the response from the dialog manager.

86. The system of claim 85, wherein the verbal response comprises a request for clarification.

87. The system of claim 84, wherein the dialog manager is further configured to generate the response as an action to be performed by a device.

88. The system of claim 87, wherein the action to be performed by the device includes accessing a database.

89. The system of claim 87, wherein the action to be performed by the device includes retrieving a piece of information.