Nuance Communications, Inc.

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.v.

Bart D'hoore

Jan Kleindienst

Ladislav Kunc

Tomás Macek

Martin Labský

Dirk Van Compernolle

Methods, devices, and computer program products for recognizing and responding to natural language input are described herein. Natural language input is received at a natural language input interface of a computing device and transformed into computer-usable text. A natural language input recognizer obtains evidence from one or more evidence source and generates an evidence graph based on the evidence obtained. Evidence may be obtained asynchronously, and the natural language input recognizer may update the evidence graph upon receipt of additional evidence. The natural language input recognizer generates a set of recognition hypotheses based on the evidence graph and selects one of the recognition hypotheses as a recognition result for the natural language input. Semantic models, evidence models, and response models may be employed to generate the evidence graph and respond to the recognition result selected for the natural language input.

Evidence-based natural language input recognition

A speech recognition system uses language independent acoustic models derived from speech data from multiple languages to represent speech units which are concatenated into words. In addition, the input speech signal which is compared to the language independent acoustic models may be vector quantized according to a codebook which is derived from speech data from multiple languages.

Language independent speech recognition

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Aalter, Belgium

Bart D'hoore