Patents by Inventor Björn Hoffmeister

Björn Hoffmeister has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 10388274
    Abstract: New facts are added to a query answering system that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) processing. Incoming ASR requests may be compared against each other to check accuracy of semantic processing. Further, accuracy of ASR transcription may be confirmed using a confidence check. Text obtained from internet or other sources may be processed with trained classifiers (which may be specific to a given relation) to identify text corresponding to the relation and to identify the entities referred to in the relation. The text, entities, and relation may then be saved and used to respond to future queries.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 31, 2016
    Date of Patent: August 20, 2019
    Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
    Inventor: Björn Hoffmeister
  • Patent number: 10332508
    Abstract: An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system uses recurrent neural network (RNN) encoding to create a feature vector corresponding to a word sequence ASR result where the feature vector incorporates data from different hierarchies (i.e., frame level, phone level, etc.) of the ASR processing. The feature vector may be used with a trained classifier to confirm that the ASR result was correct, or to otherwise assign a confidence score to the ASR results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 31, 2016
    Date of Patent: June 25, 2019
    Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
    Inventor: Björn Hoffmeister
  • Patent number: 10210862
    Abstract: Neural networks may be used in certain automatic speech recognition systems. To improve performance at these neural networks, the present system converts the lattice into a matrix form, thus maintaining certain information included in the lattice that might otherwise be lost while also placing the lattice in a form that may be manipulated by other components to perform operations such as checking ASR results. The matrix representation of the lattice may be transformed into a vector representation by calculations performed at a recurrent neural network (RNN). By representing the lattice as a vector representation the system may perform additional operations, such as ASR results confirmation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 6, 2016
    Date of Patent: February 19, 2019
    Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Faisal Ladhak, Ankur Gandhe, Markus Dreyer, Ariya Rastrow, Björn Hoffmeister, Lambert Mathias
  • Patent number: 10176802
    Abstract: An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system may convert an ASR output lattice into a matrix form, thus maintaining certain information included in the lattice that might otherwise be lost in an N-best list output. The matrix representation of the lattice may be encoded using a recurrent neural network (RNN) to create a vector representation of the lattice. The vector representation may then be used by the system to perform additional operations, such as ASR results confirmation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 6, 2016
    Date of Patent: January 8, 2019
    Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Faisal Ladhak, Ankur Gandhe, Markus Dreyer, Ariya Rastrow, Björn Hoffmeister, Lambert Mathias
  • Patent number: 10121467
    Abstract: A language model for automatic speech processing, such as a finite state transducer (FST) may be configured to incorporate information about how a particular word sequence (N-gram) may be used in a similar manner from another N-gram. A score of a component of the FST (such as an arc or state) relating to the first N-gram may be based on information of the second N-gram. Further, the FST may be configured to have an arc between a state of the first N-gram and a state of the second N-gram to allow for cross N-gram back off, rather than backoff from a larger N-gram to a smaller N-gram during traversal of the FST during speech processing.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 30, 2016
    Date of Patent: November 6, 2018
    Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Ankur Gandhe, Denis Sergeyevich Filimonov, Ariya Rastrow, Björn Hoffmeister
  • Patent number: 9600231
    Abstract: A revised support vector machine (SVM) classifier is offered to distinguish between true keywords and false positives based on output from a keyword spotting component of a speech recognition system. The SVM operates on a reduced set of feature dimensions, where the feature dimensions are selected based on their ability to distinguish between true keywords and false positives. Further, support vectors pairs are merged to create a reduced set of re-weighted support vectors. These techniques result in an SVM that may be operated using reduced computing resources, thus improving system performance.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 26, 2015
    Date of Patent: March 21, 2017
    Assignee: AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
    Inventors: Ming Sun, Björn Hoffmeister, Shiv Naga Prasad Vitaladevuni, Varun Kumar Nagaraja