Patent ID: 7289958

Claim:
A method for training acoustic models for a target language comprising the steps of: a) providing a phonetic table of a reference, which characterizes the phones used in one or more reference languages with respect to their articulatory properties; b) providing a phonetic table of a target language, which characterizes the phones used in the target language with respect to their articulatory properties; c) providing a set of trained monophones for each reference language; d) providing a database of utterances in the target language and phonetic transcription of the utterances in the database; and e) processing using table correspondence processing methods and phonetic model seeding wherein said processing step includes creating seed monophone models for the target language using the phonetic table of one or more reference languages, the phonetic models of the reference languages, and the phonetic table of the target language; and automatically performing triphone clustering based on the phonetic table of the reference and target language.