International Business Machines Corporation

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Om Dadaji Deshmukh

Ashish Verma

Nitendra Rajput

Sachindra Joshi

Amit Anil Nanavati

Karthik Visweswariah

Jitendra Ajmera

Anupam Jain

Shajith I Mohamed

Saket Saurabh

Suraj Satishkumar Sheth

Manish Anand Bhide

Sameep Mehta

Sai Zeng

Vinayaka D Pandit

Chitra Dorai

Etienne Marcheret

Shailesh Joshi

Kundan Kandhway

Maureen E Rzasa

Gary J Wright

Kartik Audhkhasi

Methods and arrangements for effecting a cloud representation of audio content. An audio cloud is created and rendered, and user interaction with at least a clip portion of the audio cloud is afforded.

Creating, rendering and interacting with a multi-faceted audio cloud

Systems and associated methods configured to provide user-driven audio content navigation for the spoken web are described. Embodiments allow users to skim audio for content that seems to be of relevance to the user, similar to visual skimming of standard web pages, and mark point of interest within the audio. Embodiments provide techniques for navigating audio content while interacting with information systems in a client-server environment, where the client device can be a simple, standard telephone.

User driven audio content navigation

Methods, systems, and computer program products for identifying one or more utterances that are likely to carry the intent of a speaker are provided herein. A method includes providing a transcript of utterances to a word weight scoring module to perform inverse document frequency based scoring on each word in the transcript, thereby generating a weight for each word; calculating a weight for each utterance in the transcript to generate weighted utterances by summing the weights or each constituent word in each utterance; comparing at least one weighted utterance to pre-existing example utterances carrying the intent of a speaker to determine a relevancy score for the at least one weighted utterance; and generating a ranked order of the at least one weighted utterance from highest to lowest intent relevancy score, wherein the highest intent relevancy score corresponds to the utterance which is most likely to carry intent of the speaker.

Intent discovery in audio or text-based conversation

A system and method are described for generating semantically similar sentences for a statistical language model. A semantic class generator determines for each word in an input utterance a set of corresponding semantically similar words. A sentence generator computes a set of candidate sentences each containing at most one member from each set of semantically similar words. A sentence verifier grammatically tests each candidate sentence to determine a set of grammatically correct sentences semantically similar to the input utterance. Also note that the generated semantically similar sentences are not restricted to be selected from an existing sentence database.

System and a method for generating semantically similar sentences for building a robust SLM

Techniques, an apparatus and an article of manufacture identifying one or more utterances that are likely to carry the intent of a speaker, from a conversation between two or more parties. A method includes obtaining an input of a set of utterances in chronological order from a conversation between two or more parties, computing an intent confidence value of each utterance by summing intent confidence scores from each of the constituent words of the utterance, wherein intent confidence scores capture each word's influence on the subsequent utterances in the conversation based on (i) the uniqueness of the word in the conversation and (ii) the number of times the word subsequently occurs in the conversation, and generating a ranked order of the utterances from highest to lowest intent confidence value, wherein the highest intent value corresponds to the utterance which is most likely to carry intent of the speaker.

Methods and arrangements for prioritizing customer service restoration, in the event of service failure or compromise such that any adverse effect of the service disruption on the customer is minimized, the perceived drop in quality of service, if any, is minimized and timely and efficient resource reallocation for service restoration is achieved. Input data relating to customer service protocols is assimilated. A service restoration order is implemented responsive to a service disruption and based on the assimilated input data. This implementing includes determining bufferable and non-bufferable services, postponing restoration of the bufferable services, and determining an order of priority of the non-bufferable services.

Methods and arrangements for prioritizing service restoration activities in the event of a catastrophic failure

Techniques for evaluating one or more spoken language skills of a speaker are provided. The techniques include identifying one or more temporal locations of interest in a speech passage spoken by a speaker, computing one or more acoustic parameters, wherein the one or more acoustic parameters capture one or more properties of one or more acoustic-phonetic features of the one or more locations of interest, and combining the one or more acoustic parameters with an output of an automatic speech recognizer to modify an output of a spoken language skill evaluation.

Evaluating spoken skills

A method, an apparatus and an article of manufacture for automatic speech recognition. The method includes obtaining at least one language model word and at least one rule-based grammar word, determining an acoustic similarity of at least one pair of language model word and rule-based grammar word, and increasing a transition cost to the at least one language model word based on the acoustic similarity of the at least one language model word with the at least one rule-based grammar word to generate a modified language model for automatic speech recognition.

Automatic speech and concept recognition

Described herein are methods, systems, apparatuses and products for reconstruction of a smooth speech signal from a stuttered speech signal. One aspect provides for accessing a stored speech signal having stuttering; identifying at least one stuttered region in the stored speech signal; modifying the at least one stuttered region in the stored speech signal; and responsive to modifying the at least one stuttered region, reconstructing a smooth speech signal corresponding to the stored speech signal. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Reconstruction of a smooth speech signal from a stuttered speech signal

Methods and arrangements for employing descriptors for agent-customer interactions are disclosed. Filtering the pooled records based on one or more predetermined criteria is done such that analyzing the filtered records and comparing one interaction between an agent and a customer with another interaction between an agent and a customer may occur.

Methods and arrangements for employing descriptors for agent-customer interactions

Systems and methods for reconstruction of a smooth speech signal from a stuttered speech signal

A procedure to automatically evaluate the spoken fluency of a speaker by prompting the speaker to talk on a given topic, recording the speaker's speech to get a recorded sample of speech, and then analyzing the patterns of disfluencies in the speech to compute a numerical score to quantify the spoken fluency skills of the speakers. The numerical fluency score accounts for various prosodic and lexical features, including formant-based filled-pause detection, closely-occurring exact and inexact repeat N-grams, normalized average distance between consecutive occurrences of N-grams. The lexical features and prosodic features are combined to classify the speaker with a C-class classification and develop a rating for the speaker.

Automatic evaluation of spoken fluency

Analyzing an audio interaction is provided. At least one change in an emotion of a speaker in an audio interaction and at least one aspect of the audio interaction are identified. The at least one change in an emotion is analyzed in conjunction with the at least one aspect to determine a relationship between the at least one change in an emotion and the at least one aspect, and a result of the analysis is provided.

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New Delhi, India

Om Dadaji Deshmukh