Patent Document ID: 8140330
Application ID: 12139401

Base Claim:
1. A method of detecting repeated patterns in a dialog system, comprising: receiving an initial utterance from a user in the dialog sequence as a set of test patterns, the initial utterance including a first plurality of words in a first order; receiving a correction utterance from the user, the correction utterance including a second plurality of words in a second order, wherein at least some of the second plurality of words are repeated from the first plurality of words; segmenting the correction utterance into a set of reference patterns by identifying silence regions separating each of the first plurality of words within the initial utterance; extracting feature vectors from the test patterns and the reference patterns; comparing each test pattern with each reference pattern over the entire length of the set of test patterns and the set of reference patterns, using a dynamic time warping process in order to determine boundaries of the reference and test patterns using spectral characteristics of the initial and correction utterances; computing distance scores between each reference pattern and each test pattern; and identifying test patterns with a distance score that is less than a defined distance threshold as a repeated pattern.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 wherein the correction utterance is provided by the user in response to an output from the dialog system, and further wherein both the correction utterance and the initial utterance comprise spoken user input and the repeated patterns that are selected from the group consisting of: words, syllables of words, and phrases of multiple words.