Polyphone network method and apparatus
AssigneeMotorola, Inc.
InventorsLynette Melnar, Jim Talley, Yuan-Jun Wei, Chen Liu
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Acoustic phones (preferably drawn 12 from a plurality of spoken languages) are provided 11. A hierarchically-organized polyphone network (20) organizes views of these phones of varying resolution and phone categorization as a function, at least in part, of phonetic similarity (14) and at least one language-independent phonological factor (15). In a preferred approach, a unique transcription system serves to represent the phones using only standard, printable ASCII characters, none of which comprises a special character (such as those characters that have a command significance for common script interpreters such as the UNIX command line).
Claims31
A method to provide a polyphone network, comprising:
- selecting a plurality of spoken languages;
- identifying at least some phones for each of the plurality of spoken languages;
- providing a polyphone network comprised of at least some of the at least some phones as a function, at least in part, of:
- phonetic similarity as between the phones;
- and
- at least one language-independent phonological factor.
A method to provide a polyphone network, comprising:
- providing a plurality of phones that correspond to a plurality of spoken languages;
- using the plurality of phones to provide a polyphone network as a function, at least in part, of:
- phonetic similarity as between the phones;
- and
- at least one language-independent phonological factor.
An apparatus comprising:
- a speech recognition engine;
- a memory operably coupled to the speech recognition engine and containing a set of models selected as a function, at least in part, of a polyphone network comprised of a plurality of phones, which phones correspond to phones as used in a plurality of spoken languages and wherein relationships between the phones are represented hierarchically by nodes that correspond to merged phones, wherein merging of the phones to form the nodes is based, at least in part, upon phonetic similarity as between the phones and at least one language-independent phonological factor.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.