Patent ID: 8019593

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of generating features within a feature space for execution in a hardware-based machine learning system for natural language processing of spoken input, the method comprising: defining an initial feature space in a feature space definition computing circuit within a hardware processor of the machine learning system; splitting the initial feature space into a first plurality of feature sets in the feature space definition computing circuit using a dimension-based split strategy that splits the initial feature space into a plurality of disjoint feature sets, each feature set based on a feature dimension for the spoken input, wherein the feature dimensions comprise word, word position, speech tagger, and prosody characteristics, and further wherein the number of features in each feature set is defined in proportion to a relative importance of the respective dimension in a natural language processing application; selecting a first plurality of feature subsets from each of the first plurality of feature sets in a feature selection computing circuit; merging the first plurality of feature subsets to produce a second feature space in the feature selection computing circuit; splitting the second feature space into a second plurality of feature sets in the feature selection computing circuit using the dimension-based split strategy, and selecting a second plurality of feature subsets from each of the second plurality of feature subsets, and merging the second plurality of feature subsets to produce a third feature space; and performing at least one further feature selection process on the second feature space and any subsequent feature space in the feature selection computing circuit using subsequent dimension-based split strategy and merging operations.