Patent ID: 7912713

Claim:
An automatic speech recognition method for identifying words from an input speech signal, comprising: providing at least one hypothesis recognition based on said input speech signal, said hypothesis recognition being an individual hypothesis word or a sequence of individual hypothesis words; and computing, by a processing system, a confidence measure for said hypothesis recognition, based on said input speech signal, said computing a confidence measure comprising: computing, by the processing system, differential contributions (C i,t ) to said confidence measure, each as a difference between a constrained acoustic score (SCV i,t ) and an unconstrained acoustic score (SCL t ); and computing, by the processing system, said confidence measure based on said differential contributions (C i,t ), comprising: weighting, by the processing system, each differential contribution (C i,t ) with a cumulative distribution function (F ξ i ) of the differential contribution (C i,t ), wherein a probability distribution of the weighted differential contribution is a uniform distribution.