Patent Document ID: 9514109
Application ID: 13739278

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of scoring a speech sample, comprising: performing automatic speech recognition with an automatic speech recognizer to generate a transcription of the sample, the automatic speech recognizer comprising a computerized language model and a computerized acoustic model trained based on speech samples from multiple speakers, and storing words of the transcription in a first data structure; associating the words of the transcription with part of speech labels with a computer processing system based on an analysis of the words with the processing system; generating part of speech sequences based on the part of speech labels with the computer processing system and storing the part of speech sequences in a second data structure; generating a first vector comprising the part of speech sequences and associated first numerical weights, each first numerical weight indicating a relative frequency of the associated part of speech sequence in the speech sample or a presence of the associated part of speech sequence in the speech sample; calculating a similarity score between the first vector and each of multiple score-level vectors, each score-level vector comprising (i) part of speech sequences occurring in a set of speech samples of a training corpus, each speech sample of the set being assigned a same score, and (ii) associated second numerical weights, each second numerical weight being based on a relative frequency of the associated part of speech sequence in the set and a relative importance of the associated part of speech sequence in differentiating speech samples assigned the score of the set from speech samples assigned different scores; and comparing the similarity scores using the computer processing system and scoring the speech sample with a computerized scoring model based on the comparison.

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Claim 21:
21. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising: determining a presence of first part of speech sequences associated with grammatically sophisticated speech in the speech sample; and determining a presence of second part of speech sequences associated with grammatically unsophisticated speech in the speech sample, wherein the speech sample is scored based on the presences of the first and second part of speech sequences.