Patent ID: 7974843

Claim:
A method for automated language recognition of words from different languages said method embodied as computer program instructions encoded in tangible, non-transitory computer readable media associated with a mobile device and comprising the steps of: (a) loading a phoneme set associated with a language specified as a mother tongue into a mother tongue language recognizer; (b) for each of a plurality of words, determining phonetic transcripts for the word for N various languages not specified as the mother tongue to generate N first phoneme sequences for the word corresponding to N first pronunciation variants, each of the N first phoneme sequences formed from phonemes associated with one of the N different languages; (c) determining a phoneme map by mapping the generated first phoneme sequences of each of said N languages to a relevant phoneme set of the mother tongue; (d) for each of the plurality of words, applying the phoneme map to each of the N first phoneme sequences for that word in order to translate the N first phoneme sequences into N second phoneme sequences, each of the N second phoneme sequences formed from phonemes associated with the mother tongue language, wherein each of the N first phoneme sequences of the N various language is translated into a corresponding second phoneme sequence of the mother tongue language (a) regardless of whether the mobile device includes a speech model for each of the N various languages, and (b) regardless of whether the mother tongue language is the most acoustically similar to each of the N various languages, with respect to the respective first and second phoneme sequences, and such that for each word, two different phonetic transcripts are generated for each of the N different languages, including (1) the N first phoneme sequences for the word, each formed from phonemes associated with one of the N different languages, and (2) the N second phoneme sequences for the word, each formed by applying the phoneme map to translate one of the N first phoneme sequences formed from phonemes associated with one of the N different languages into a sequence of phonemes associated with the mother tongue language; and (e) processing said N second phoneme sequences with the phoneme set associated with the language specified as the mother tongue to identify at least one of a matching word and a similar word.