Patent Document ID: 20080091424
Application ID: 11581673
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method comprising: setting parameter values for a set of acoustic models used in speech recognition; for each of a set of utterances, decoding the utterance using the set of acoustic models to identify a set of competitor word sequences for the utterance and to determine a probability of each word sequence given the utterance; setting a weight with a positive value that is different than one for at least one competitor word sequence of each utterance; updating a parameter value in the set of acoustic models through steps comprising: for each competitor word sequence for a selected utterance, using the weight for the word sequence, the probability of the word sequence given the selected utterance and an occupation probability that describes the probability of being in a particular state of the acoustic model at a particular time given the selected utterance and the word sequence to form a score for the word sequence; summing the scores for the word sequences as part of forming a score for the selected utterance; and using the score for the selected utterance to update a parameter value.