Patent ID: 7430503

Claim:
A method of combining corpora to achieve consistency in phonetic labeling, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving corpora; (b) selecting a first corpus from the corpora; (c) if the first corpus does not include a phonetic transcript of the first corpus then generating the phonetic transcript of the first corpus using a user-definable first pronunciation dictionary, where each word in the first corpus is associated with at least one sequence of at least one phone symbol; (d) selecting a second corpus from the corpora; (e) if the second corpus does not include a phonetic transcript of the second corpus then generating a phonetic transcript for the second corpus using a user-definable second pronunciation dictionary, where each word in the second corpus is associated with at least one sequence of at least one phone symbol; (f) identifying at least one allophone for each phone in the second corpus; (g) identifying for each phone in the second corpus one of the at least one allophone identified in step (f) that most closely matches the phone in the second corpus using a user-definable acoustic model for each of the at least one allophone; (h) replacing each phone symbol in the phonetic transcript of the second corpus with a symbol for the corresponding allophone identified in step (g); (i) combining the first corpus and the second corpus, including the phonetic transcript of the first corpus and the phonetic transcript of the second corpus, and designating the result as the first corpus; and (j) returning to step (d) if there is another corpus in the corpora to be processed, otherwise stopping.