Patent ID: 7286987

Claim:
A method of processing speech, comprising: generating a list of candidate words for at least one set of phonemes, each candidate word having a pronunciation boundary, from a phoneme analysis of a received speech input; permuting at least one member of the list of candidate words for the at least one set of phonemes to generate a plurality of potential syntactic structures which are valid in accordance with a set of syntactic rules, while respecting pronunciation boundaries of the candidate words; generating a plurality of valid syntactic sequences of words from the permuted candidate words and potential syntactic structures; processing a speech input to identify a plurality of syntactic sequences of words, the syntactic sequences of words comprising the candidate words, the candidate words and the syntactic sequences of words each having at least one associated part of speech; deriving one or more conceptual representations lion at least one of the syntactic sequences of words; and formulating one or more responses to the speech input based on at least one conceptual representation.