Patent ID: 6865528

Claim:
A language processing system comprising: a unified language model comprising: a plurality of context-free grammars comprising non-terminal tokens representing semantic or syntactic concepts and terminals, wherein each of the terminals include a probability value assigned by using non-uniform probability values derived from a terminal based language model and normalizing said values using the set of terminals constrained by the plurality of context-free grammars; and a N-gram language model having the non-terminal tokens; and a language processing module capable of receiving an input signal indicative of language and accessing the unified language model to recognize the language and predict non-terminal tokens contained therein, the language processing module further generating hypotheses for the received language as a function of words in the unified language model corresponding to the non-terminal tokens predicted and calculating a language model score for each of the hypotheses using the associated probability value for each terminal present therein and obtained from the plurality of context-free grammars.