International Business Machines Corporation

Gerhard Backfried

Hubert Cr&eacute;py

Maria Elena Smith

Bernard John Grainger

Martin Herzog

A computerized method is provided for adding a new word to a vocabulary of a speech system, the vocabulary comprising words and corresponding acoustic patterns for a language or language domain. Within a determination step for the new word, a regularity value is determined which measures the conformity with respect to the pronunciation in the language or language domain. In a comparison step, the regularity value is compared to a threshold value to decide whether the conformity is insufficient. Only in the affirmative case of insufficient conformity, a prompting step is performed, prompting for additional information on the pronunciation of the new word. Finally, in an extension step, the new word and an acoustic pattern of the new word are added to the vocabulary.

Method and apparatus for expanding the vocabulary of a speech system

A method for supporting customized tokenization of domain-specific text acomprises the steps of: loading domain-specific tokenization rules corresponding to the customized tokenization of the domain-specific text; tokenizing the domain-specific text using the loaded domain-specific tokenization rules; and, further tokenizing the domain-specific text using general purpose tokenization rules. The loading step of the inventive method can comprise: loading a speech recognition vocabulary; and, loading domain-specific tokenization rules corresponding to the speech recognition vocabulary. In addition, the tokenizing step can comprise identifying each substring in the domain-specific text matching a regular expression having a corresponding replacement pattern in the loaded domain-specific tokenization rules, and replacing each substring identified in the identifying step with the replacement pattern corresponding to the matched regular expression. Alternatively, the tokenizing step can comprise identifying substrings in the domain-specific text matching a regular expression having a corresponding replacement pattern in the second loaded domain-specific tokenization rules; excluding from further processing the identified substrings having a do-not-replace marker associated with the identified substring; and, replacing each non-excluded identified substring with the replacement pattern corresponding to the matched regular expression.

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Purkersdorf, Austria

Gerhard Backfried