Patent ID: 6629073
Filing Date: 2003-09-30
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
A speech recognition system for identifying words from a series of feature vectors representing speech, the system comprising:an acoustic model capable of providing large-unit probabilities for feature vectors spanned by each of a set of large acoustic units and sub-unit probabilities for feature vectors spanned by at least one acoustic sub-unit of a set of acoustic sub-units, the large acoustic units formed from at least two acoustic sub-units such that each large acoustic unit spans the same feature vectors spanned by the acoustic sub-units that form the large acoustic unit; and a decoder capable of generating a score that is indicative of the probability that a sequence of words is represented by the series of feature vectors, the score being based on at least one large-unit probability and at least one sub-unit probability, wherein, when combined, the acoustic sub-units associated with all of the sub-unit probabilities in the score span fewer than all of the feature vectors in the series of feature vectors.