Patent Document ID: 6067514
Application ID: 09102920

Base Claim:
1. In a speech recognition system that outputs a sequence of decoded words, a method for automatically punctuating the sequence of decoded words comprises the steps of: in a vocabulary that defines items in a language model, the items including words and punctuation marks, assigning at least one baseform to each of the punctuation marks, the at least one baseform corresponding to at least one of silence and a non-word noise; in the language model, defining conditional probabilities for each of the punctuation marks based upon at least one of at least one preceding word and at least one succeeding word; and automatically inserting a subject punctuation mark at a given point in the sequence of decoded words when an acoustic score and a language model score associated with the subject punctuation mark produce a higher combined likelihood than the acoustic score and the language model score associated with any other item in the vocabulary for the given point in the sequence of decoded words.

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Claim 7:
7. The method of claim 1, wherein the language model is an n-gram language model, and said method further comprises the step of: in a training phase of the n-gram language model, segmenting a corresponding text corpus into paragraphs to obtain the conditional probabilities for the punctuation marks.