Patent ID: 7496512

Claim:
A method of ascertaining phoneme speech unit boundaries of adjacent speech units in speech data, the method comprising: receiving training data of speech waveforms with known boundary locations of phoneme speech units contained therein; processing the speech waveforms to obtain multi-frame acoustic feature pseudo-triphone representations of a plurality of pseudo-triphones in the speech data, each pseudo-triphone comprising a boundary location, a first phoneme speech unit preceding the boundary location and a second phoneme speech unit following the boundary location; clustering the multi-frame acoustic feature pseudo-triphone representations as a function of acoustic similarity in a plurality of clusters; training a refining model for each cluster; receiving a second set of data of speech waveforms with initial boundary locations of adjacent phoneme speech units contained therein; identifying pseudo-triphones in the second set of data and corresponding refining models for each of the pseudo-triphones; and using the refining model for each corresponding pseudo-triphone for the second set of data to locate a new boundary location different than the initial boundary and provide output indicating the new boundary locations.