Patent Document ID: 7752044
Application ID: 10683495
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of an information processing apparatus for recognizing speech, comprising: receiving a speech input from at least one speaker; performing a process of recognizing speech in said speech input, so as to obtain at least one recognition result for said speech input, wherein phoneme boundaries are given; obtaining or generating, by the information processing apparatus, at least one confidence measure from said speech input for said recognition result, said confidence measure being descriptive of the reliability of said recognition result for said speech input; obtaining or generating, by the information processing apparatus, phoneme boundary verification measures from said speech input, said phoneme boundary verification measures providing a measure of the likelihood that said phoneme boundaries are actual phoneme boundaries, wherein the process of obtaining or generating said confidence measure is at least partially based on an average value, a minimum value, a difference between a maximum value and the minimum value, a standard deviation, or a coefficient of variation of said phoneme boundary verification measures, said phoneme boundary verification measures are based on a similarity function s representing a similarity s(x, y) of left and right contexts or of left and right context vectors x, y of the phoneme boundaries, the left context for obtaining the left context vector x for one of said phoneme boundaries includes only speech frames of at least one of a group including only a last and a penultimate Hidden Markov Model state, the Hidden Markov Model to which the last and the penultimate Hidden Markov Model states belong modeling a preceding segment, preceding said one of said phoneme boundaries, and the right context for obtaining the right context vector y for the one of said phoneme boundaries includes only speech frames of at least one of a group including only a first and a second Hidden Markov Model state, the Hidden Markov Model to which the first and the second Hidden Markov Model states belong modeling a succeeding segment, succeeding said one of said phoneme boundaries.