Patent Document ID: 8738378
Application ID: 12634208

Base Claim:
1. A speech recognition apparatus comprising: a memory; and a processor executing a plurality of instructions stored in the memory, the instructions comprising: a speech analyzing instruction that converts an inputted utterance speech into a feature amount; a recognized-word storing instruction that stores a pronunciation of a recognized word; a conversion rule storing instruction that stores a conversion rule between a pronunciation and a phoneme or a conversion rule between a pronunciation and a phoneme string; a phoneme string converting instruction that converts the pronunciation of the recognized word stored by the recognized-word storing instruction into a phoneme string in accordance with the conversion rule stored by the conversion rule storing instruction; a phoneme model storing instruction that stores a standard pattern obtained by modeling information about which phoneme tends to become what kind of feature amount; a word model generating instruction that generates a word model as a standard pattern string by extracting standard patterns stored by the phoneme model storing instruction on the basis of the phoneme string converted by the phoneme string converting instruction and by linking the extracted standard patterns; and a speech collating instruction that calculates similarities at each time between the feature amount converted by the speech analyzing instruction and the word model generated by the word model generating instruction, wherein: the conversion rule storing instruction further stores a first threshold value condition associated with each of ambiguous phonemes or each of ambiguous phoneme strings of at least one of the conversion rules, which is ambiguous in a case where a human being vocalizes the recognized word, wherein different values are assigned to said first threshold value condition for different ambiguous phonemes and/or different ambiguous phoneme strings, and the speech collating instruction extracts a word model from the word models generated by the word model generating instruction, whose minimum similarity among the similarities at each time satisfies a second threshold value condition, and whose overall similarity obtained from similarities at each time satisfies a third threshold value condition, and whose similarity at each time in a section among vocalization sections of the utterance speech and corresponding to either one of the ambiguous phonemes or one of the phoneme strings, satisfies the first threshold value condition, which is stored by being associated with the one of the ambiguous phoneme or the one of the ambiguous phoneme strings, and outputs the recognized word as a recognition result corresponding to the extracted word model.

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Claim 5:
5. The speech recognition apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein: the conversion rule storing instruction further stores a duration associated with the phoneme or the phoneme string of the conversion rule, and the speech collating instruction determines whether a vocalization period in a section among vocalization sections of the utterance speech and corresponding to either the phoneme or the phoneme string associated with the duration is at least equal to the duration or not; when determining that the vocalization period in the section is equal to or longer than the duration, the speech collating instruction rejects the extracted word model, and when determining that the vocalization period in the section is shorter than the duration, the speech collating instruction outputs as the recognition result the recognized word corresponding to the extracted word model.