METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DISCOVERING TRENDING TERMS IN SPEECH REQUESTS

• US 20160078860A1
• Filed: 08/28/2015
• Published: 03/17/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 09/11/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Original Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Inventors: Evermann, Gunnar, Gillick, Laurence S., Paulik, Matthias
• Granted Patent: US 9,818,400 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/02 Feature extraction for speech recognition; Selection of recognition unit
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/063 Training
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/1815 Semantic context, e.g. disambiguation of the recognition hypotheses based on word meaning
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/183 using context dependencies, e.g. language models
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/197 Probabilistic grammars, e.g. word n-grams
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 25/33 using fuzzy logic

Abstract

Systems and processes are disclosed for discovering trending terms in automatic speech recognition. Candidate terms (e.g., words, phrases, etc.) not yet found in a speech recognizer vocabulary or having low language model probability can be identified based on trending usage in a variety of electronic data sources (e.g., social network feeds, news sources, search queries, etc.). When candidate terms are identified, archives of live or recent speech traffic can be searched to determine whether users are uttering the candidate terms in dictation or speech requests. Such searching can be done using open vocabulary spoken term detection to find phonetic matches in the audio archives. As the candidate terms are found in the speech traffic, notifications can be generated that identify the candidate terms, provide relevant usage statistics, identify the context in which the terms are used, and the like.

Claims

1. A method for discovering trending terms in automatic speech recognition, the method comprising:

at an electronic device having a processor and memory;

identifying a candidate term based on a frequency of occurrence of the term in an electronic data source;

in response to identifying the candidate term, searching for the candidate term in an archive of speech traffic of an automatic speech recognizer using phonetic matching; and

in response to finding the candidate term in the archive, generating a notification comprising the candidate term.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying the candidate term comprises:

identifying one or more terms in the electronic data source;

determining a frequency of occurrence of the one or more terms in the electronic data source; and

selecting the candidate term based on the determined frequency of occurrence of the one or more terms.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein selecting the candidate term comprises selecting from the one or more terms a term having a highest frequency of occurrence in the electronic data source.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the candidate term comprises a phrase of two or more words.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the archive of speech traffic comprises speech audio.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the archive of speech traffic comprises a phonetically indexed speech recognition lattice.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein searching the archive comprises using open vocabulary spoken term detection to find the candidate term in the archive.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein searching the archive comprises using fuzzy matching to find the candidate term in the archive.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

in response to finding the candidate term in the archive, generating a statistic based on a frequency of occurrence of the candidate term in the archive;

wherein the notification comprises the statistic.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the notification comprises a context associated with the candidate term found in the archive.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the context comprises one or more words adjacent to the candidate term in the archive.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein the context comprises a user request for a virtual assistant, wherein the user request comprises the candidate term.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the notification comprises a geographical location associated with an occurrence of the candidate term in the archive.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein the notification comprises a user profile associated with an occurrence of the candidate term in the archive.

15. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

adding the candidate term to a vocabulary associated with the automatic speech recognizer.

16. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

training a virtual assistant to respond to queries associated with the candidate term.

17. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

updating an n-gram language model associated with the automatic speech recognizer based on the candidate term.

18. The method of claim 1, wherein the candidate term is out-of-vocabulary for the automatic speech recognizer.

19. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying the candidate term comprises:

identifying one or more terms in the electronic data source that are not found in a vocabulary of the automatic speech recognizer;

determining a frequency of occurrence of the one or more terms in the electronic data source; and

selecting the candidate term based on the determined frequency of occurrence of the one or more terms.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein selecting the candidate term comprises selecting from the one or more terms a term having a highest frequency of occurrence in the electronic data source.

21. The method of claim 1, wherein identifying the candidate term comprises:

identifying the candidate term based on a speech recognizer language model probability associated with the candidate term.

22. The method of claim 21, wherein the language model probability is low compared to the frequency of occurrence of the candidate term.

23. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

transcribing a portion of the archive of speech traffic using the automatic speech recognizer; and

determining and providing context based on the transcribed portion of the archive of speech traffic.

24. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium comprising computer-executable instructions, which when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to:

identify a candidate term based on a frequency of occurrence of the term in an electronic data source;

in response to identifying the candidate term, search for the candidate term in an archive of speech traffic of an automatic speech recognizer using phonetic matching; and

in response to finding the candidate term in the archive, generate a notification comprising the candidate term.

25. A system comprising:

one or more processors;

memory storing computer-readable instructions, which when executed by the one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to;

identify a candidate term based on a frequency of occurrence of the term in an electronic data source;

in response to identifying the candidate term, search for the candidate term in an archive of speech traffic of an automatic speech recognizer using phonetic matching; and

in response to finding the candidate term in the archive, generate a notification comprising the candidate term.