Partial word lists into a phoneme tree

• US 8,650,032 B2
• Filed: 11/02/2011
• Issued: 02/11/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 11/30/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cerence Operating Company (Cerence Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Fu, Guo Kang, Han, Zhao Bing, Jia, Bin, Liu, Ying
• Primary Examiner(s): Chawan, Vijay B.
• Application Number:
  US13/287,400
• Publication Number:
  US 20120136661A1
• Time in Patent Office: 832 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 704/242
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/187 Phonemic context, e.g. pronunciation rules, phonotactical constraints or phoneme n-grams

Abstract

The present invention discloses converting a text form into a speech. In the present invention, partial word lists of a data source are obtained by parsing the data source in parallel or in series. The partial word lists are then compiled to obtain phoneme graphs corresponding, respectively, to the partial word lists, and then the obtained phoneme graphs are combined. Speech recognition is then conducted according to the combination results. According to the present invention, computational complexity may be reduced and recognition efficiency may be improved during speech recognition.

Claims

1. A system for converting a text form into a phoneme tree, comprising:

a data parser, configured to parse a data source in the text form to obtain a plurality of partial word lists of the data source, the data source comprising content of a web page;

one or more compilers, configured to compile the plurality of partial word lists to create a plurality of phoneme graphs, each phoneme graph corresponding to a respective partial word list, each phoneme graph including a root node, a plurality of phonemes, and an end node;

a combiner, configured to combine the created phoneme graphs to form the phoneme tree, wherein the phoneme tree includes at least a first phoneme graph and a second phoneme graph sharing a common root node and a common end node.

2. The system according to claim 1, further comprising:

a judger, configured to judge whether the phoneme tree has sufficient information to conduct speech recognition, and wherein responsive to judging that there is sufficient information, the speech recognizer conducts the speech recognition using the phoneme tree.

3. The system according to claim 1, wherein under a circumstance that the data source changes responsive to a user clicking on a link of a rendering of the web page, the combiner continues combination of the created phoneme graphs into the phoneme tree and caches the phoneme tree for use by the speech recognizer while the data parser parses the changed data source to obtain updated partial word lists, the one or more compilers compile the updated partial word lists to create updated phoneme graphs corresponding, respectively, to the updated partial word lists, and the combiner combines the created updated phoneme graphs into an updated phoneme tree that is then used by the speech recognizer to conduct the speech recognition of the text form in the changed data source.

4. The system according to claim 1, further comprising:

a segmenter, configured to segment the data source to obtain segments of the data source, wherein a plurality of data parsers parses the data source segments, in parallel, to obtain the plurality of partial word lists of the data source segments for use by the one or more compilers.

5. The system according to claim 1, wherein the data parser parses the data source, in series, to obtain the plurality of partial word lists of the data source for use by the one or more compilers.

6. The system according to claim 1, further comprising:

an optimizer, configured to optimize the phoneme tree responsive to determining that at least two branches of the phoneme tree contain identical nodes.

7. The system according to claim 1, wherein at least one of the one or more compilers comprises:

a grammar obtainer, configured to apply a grammar template with respect to a selected one of the partial word lists to create a grammar corresponding to the selected partial word list, the created grammar specifying a sequence of words determined to be present in the selected partial word list;

a determiner, configured to determine a phoneme list of the grammar, the phoneme list specifying, for each of at least one pronunciation of each word in the specified sequence of words, a list of phonemes corresponding to the each pronunciation;

a creator, configured to create the phoneme graph corresponding to the determined phoneme list; and

an optimizer, configured to optimize the phoneme graph.

8. The system according to claim 1, wherein the combiner, when combining the plurality of phoneme graphs to form the phoneme tree, is further configured to optimize the phoneme tree by eliminating from the second phoneme graph a list of phonemes appearing in the first phoneme graph, the combiner further configured to create, at either the first or last phoneme in the list, a common intermediate node between the first phoneme graph and the second phoneme graph in the phoneme tree.