Patent ID: 6275801
Filing Date: 2001-08-14
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
In a speech recognition system a method for fast match processing comprising the steps of:(a) computing an a-priori probability of occurrence for each word from an acoustic vocabulary;(b) deriving a penalty score for each word from said acoustic vocabulary based on each word's a-priori probability of occurrence in an input spoken text;analyzing said input spoken text for:(c) computing a path score for each word from said input spoken text, wherein step (c) further comprises the step of constructing an asynchronous tree structure comprising a plurality of branches, leaf nodes, and non-leaf nodes, each leaf node representing one of said words from the input spoken text and each non-leaf node representing a single phone of one or more said words from the input spoken text, wherein each of said leaf nodes is assigned a penalty score in accordance with the word associated with the leaf node and non-leaf nodes are assigned penalty scores derived from leaf node penalty scores, the step of assigning penalty scores for non-leaf nodes from leaf node penalty scores further comprising:identifying a non-leaf node in the tree that is a parent node to at least one leaf node;determining whether there is more than one identified child leaf node;based on the determination step, whenever there is more than one identified child leaf node, choosing the penalty score associated with the child leaf node whose penalty score is most positive, otherwise, whenever there is only one child leaf node, selecting that child leaf node's penalty score; and(d) combining the computed path score with the derived penalty score to form a combined score and testing the combined score against a threshold to determine top ranking candidate words.