Patent ID: 6912499

Claim:
A method for generating a multilingual speech model set, said multilingual speech model set being suitable for use in a multilingual speech recognition system, said method comprising: a) providing a group of acoustic sub-word units comprising: a first subgroup of acoustic sub-word units associated to a first language with each acoustic sub-word unit associated in said first subgroup having an associated speech model; a second subgroup of acoustic sub-word units associated to a second language; said first subgroup and said second subgroup sharing at least one common acoustic sub-word unit; b) providing a training set comprising a plurality of entries, each entry having a speech token representative of a word and a label being an orthographic representation of the word; c) providing a set of untrained speech models, said set of untrained speech models having at least a first untrained speech model, further comprising, (i) providing said first untrained speech model by initializing at least one acoustic sub-word unit of said second subgroup with said associated speech model of at least one acoustic sub-word unit of said first subgroup that is acoustically similar to said at least one acoustic sub-word unit of said second subgroup; d) training the set of untrained speech models by utilizing said training set, a plurality of letter to acoustic sub-word unit rules sets and said group of acoustic sub-word units to derive the multilingual speech model set, each letter to acoustic sub-word unit rules set being associated to a different language.