Patent Document ID: 7840408
Application ID: 11551025

Base Claim:
1. A method for training a duration prediction model, comprising: generating an initial duration prediction model with a plurality of attributes related to duration prediction and at least part of possible attribute combinations of said plurality of attributes, in which each of said plurality of attributes and said attribute combinations is included as an item; calculating importance of each item in said duration prediction model with a computer processor; deleting the item having a lowest importance calculated; re-generating a duration prediction model with remaining items; determining whether said re-generated duration prediction model is an optimal model; and repeating said step of calculating importance and the steps following said step of calculating importance with a newly re-generated duration prediction model, if said duration prediction model is determined as not an optimal model.

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Claim 3:
3. The method for training a duration prediction model according to claim 1 , wherein said plurality of attributes related to duration prediction include: any selected from current phoneme, another phoneme in a same syllable, neighboring phoneme in a previous syllable, neighboring phoneme in a next syllable, tone of a current syllable, tone of the previous syllable, tone of the next syllable, part of speech, distance to a next pause, distance to a previous pause, phoneme position in a lexical word, length of a current, previous and next lexical word, number of syllables in the lexical word, syllable position in a sentence, and number of lexical words in the sentence.