Patent ID: 8566097

Claim:
A lexical acquisition apparatus, comprising: one or more of computers for carrying out data processing; a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having computer executable instructions and data stored therein, the instructions and data being configured such that when the instructions are read and executed, said one or more of the computers function as: a phoneme recognition section for preparing a phoneme sequence candidate from an inputted speech; a word matching section for preparing a plurality of word sequences based on the phoneme sequence candidate; a discrimination section for selecting, from among a plurality of word sequences, a word sequence having a high likelihood in a recognition result; and an acquisition section for acquiring a new word based on the word sequence selected by the discrimination section, wherein the storage medium contains a teaching word list listing words that may be uttered by a user as part of the inputted speech to teach a name to the apparatus, and a probability model of the teaching word and an unknown word, wherein the discrimination section calculates, for each the word sequence, a first evaluation value indicating how well words in the word sequence correspond to teaching words in the list and a second evaluation value showing a probability at which the words in the word sequence are adjacent to one another in accordance with the probability model, and selects a word sequence for which a sum of the first evaluation value and the second evaluation value is maximum, and wherein the acquisition section acquires, as a new word, a word in the word sequence selected by the discrimination section that is not involved in the calculation of the first evaluation value.