Importance

Loading Importance Indicators...

Abstract

A database retrieval system obtains telephone directory information, and includes a speech receiving unit that outputs an acoustic observation sequence corresponding to a speaker's utterance of a first name and last name of someone for whom a telephone number is desired. The system also includes a speech recognition processing unit that performs speech recognition processing on acoustic observations, to obtain a list of candidate hypotheses, and to obtain a match score for each candidate hypothesis. The system further includes a hypothesis evaluating unit that determines whether any candidate hypothesis has an initial for a first name part of the corresponding database entry, to generate all consistent first names, and to obtain a plurality of generated hypotheses corresponding to each of the generated first names. The speech recognition processing unit performs another speech recognition processing on the acoustic observation sequence, to obtain a match score for each generated hypothesis. The hypothesis evaluation unit updates a match score for each candidate hypothesis to a highest match score of the corresponding ones of the generated hypotheses, and a best scoring candidate hypothesis is used to obtain information from a database.

Loading the Abstract Image...

First Claim