Patent ID: 7379870

Claim:
A contextual filter for use within a computer-based speech recognition system comprising: a shallow parser input for receiving a representation of an utterance into a shallow parser component in a form of a first word lattice, the first word lattice including a set of potential textual word sequence matches for the utterance, where the textual word sequence matches include at least one word; the shallow parser component operative for receiving and analyzing the first word lattice to produce a second word lattice, and including a filter selected from a group consisting of a sub-categorization licensing filter, a predication licensing filter, an adverbial licensing filter, and a discourse licensing filter, where the filter assigns a probability match for a potential word match in relation to another potential word match in the utterance based on a particular filter-specific criteria; and a shallow parser output for outputting the probability matches from the shallow parser component as a portion of a second word lattice for further processing to determine most likely combinations of words present in the utterance.