Patent Document ID: 20090063150
Application ID: 11845462
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for automatically identifying sentence boundaries in noisy conversational transcription data, comprising: pre-processing the conversational data for removing transcription symbols and noise; marking sentence boundaries based on long silences in the transcription data or using manually marked sentence boundaries in the transcription data, wherein said marked transcription data forms a training set; determining frequencies of head and tail n-grams that occur at the beginning and ending of sentences in the training set; filtering out from the training set n-grams that occur a significant number of times in the middle of sentences in relation to the frequencies at which the n-gram occur at the beginning or ending of sentences; marking a boundary in the conversational data before every head n-gram and after every tail n-gram that occurs in the conversational data and that also remains in the training set after filtering; identifying turns occurring in the conversational data indicating a speaker change in the conversational data; marking a boundary in the conversational data after each turn, unless the turn ends with an impermissible tail word or includes a word indicating an incomplete turn; and removing false boundaries from the conversational data, wherein the steps of marking identify sentence boundaries in the conversational data.