Patent ID: 8321427

Claim:
A method for identifying names, personalities, titles, and topics, whether or not said names, personalities, titles and topics are present in a given repository, and for placing them into a grammar for use in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, comprising the steps of: extracting search term candidates from published lists of the text of frequent searches presented to popular text-based search engines, published lists of popular artists and song titles, published lists of most popular tags, published lists of most-emailed stories, and published news feeds, the step of extracting further comprising: automatically identifying explicitly marked candidate search terms from at least one structured published list of content; and extracting candidate search terms from unstructured published content by performing an extraction means selected from among: available named entity extraction (NEE); topic detection and tracking (TDT); direct human intervention; and a combination of NEE, TDT, and direct human intervention; storing said candidate search terms in a historical database of candidate search terms; storing a history of said extracted search term candidates; extracting verified search terms from internal sources of said repository; matching candidate search terms against verified search terms by edit distance techniques to obtain plausible linguistic variants of verified search terms; using said linguistic variants to generate augmented verified search terms; storing a history of said augmented verified search terms; establishing a set of null search terms comprising candidate search terms having a threshold incidence count in said history of said extracted search term candidates and in said history of said augmented verified search terms; and expanding said grammar by adding said set of null search terms to said grammar of said automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.