Abstract: When using finite-state devices to perform various functions, it is beneficial to use finite state devices representing regular grammars with terminals having markup-language-based semantics. By using markup-language-based symbols in the finite state devices, it is possible to generate valid markup-language expressions by concatenating the symbols representing the result of the performed function. The markup-language expression can be used by other applications and/or devices. Finite-state devices are used to convert strings of words and gestures into valid markup-language, for example, XML, expressions that can be used, for example, to provide an application program interface to underlying system applications.

Abstract: In an embodiment of a messaging system, a method for presenting a commercial message to a user is provided. A target language in which the user is comfortable communicating may be determined based on at least one communication received by the user or at least one communication provided by the user. The commercial message may be presented to the user in the target language.

Abstract: A system and method are disclosed that improve automatic speech recognition in a spoken dialog system. The method comprises partitioning speech recognizer output into self-contained clauses, identifying a dialog act in each of the self-contained clauses, qualifying dialog acts by identifying a current domain object and/or a current domain action, and determining whether further qualification is possible for the current domain object and/or current domain action. If further qualification is possible, then the method comprises identifying another domain action and/or another domain object associated with the current domain object and/or current domain action, reassigning the another domain action and/or another domain object as the current domain action and/or current domain object and then recursively qualifying the new current domain action and/or current object. This process continues until nothing is left to qualify.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for using a classifier for processing a query are disclosed. For example, the method receives a query from a user, and processes the query to locate one or more documents in accordance with a search engine having a discriminative classifier, wherein the discriminative classifier is trained with a plurality of artificial query examples. The method then presents a result of the processing to the user.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, computer-implemented methods, and tangible computer-readable media for enriching spoken language translation with dialog acts. The method includes receiving a source speech signal, tagging dialog acts associated with the received source speech signal using a classification model, dialog acts being domain independent descriptions of an intended action a speaker carries out by uttering the source speech signal, producing an enriched hypothesis of the source speech signal incorporating the dialog act tags, and outputting a natural language response of the enriched hypothesis in a target language. Tags can be grouped into sets such as statement, acknowledgement, abandoned, agreement, question, appreciation, and other. The step of producing an enriched translation of the source speech signal uses a dialog act specific translation model containing a phrase translation table.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for collecting web data in order to create diverse language models. A system configured to practice the method first crawls, such as via a crawler operating on a computing device, a set of documents in a network of interconnected devices according to a visitation policy, wherein the visitation policy is configured to focus on novelty regions for a current language model built from previous crawling cycles by crawling documents whose vocabulary considered likely to fill gaps in the current language model. A language model from a previous cycle can be used to guide the creation of a language model in the following cycle. The novelty regions can include documents with high perplexity values over the current language model.

Abstract: A clausifier for extracting clauses for spoken language understanding is disclosed. The method relates to generating a set of clauses from speech utterance text and comprises inserting at least one boundary tag in speech utterance text related to sentence boundaries, inserting at least one edit tag indicating a portion of the speech utterance text to remove, and inserting at least one conjunction tag within the speech utterance text. The result is a set of clauses that may be identified within the speech utterance text according to the inserted at least one boundary tag, at least one edit tag and at least one conjunction tag. The disclosed clausifier comprises a sentence boundary classifier, an edit detector classifier, and a conjunction detector classifier. The clausifier may comprise a single classifier or a plurality of classifiers to perform the steps of identifying sentence boundaries, editing text, and identifying conjunctions within the text.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for bootstrapping a language translation system. A system configured to practice the method performs a bidirectional web crawl to identify a bilingual website. The system analyzes data on the bilingual website to make a classification decision about whether the root of the bilingual website is an entry point for the bilingual website. The bilingual site can contain pairs of parallel pages. Each pair can include a first website in a first language and a second website in a second language, and a first portion of the first web page corresponds to a second portion of the second web page. Then the system analyzes the first and second web pages to identify corresponding information pairs in the first and second languages, and extracts the corresponding information pairs from the first and second web pages for use in a language translation model.

Abstract: Disclosed are systems, methods, and computer readable media for retrieving digital images. The method embodiment includes converting a descriptive audio stream of a digital video that is provided for the visually impaired to text and then aligning that text to the appropriate segment of the digital video. The system then indexes the converted text from the descriptive audio stream with the text's relationship to the digital video. The system enables queries using action words describing a desired scene from a digital video.

Abstract: A method, a system and a machine-readable medium are provided for an on demand translation service. A translation module including at least one language pair module for translating a source language to a target language may be made available for use by a subscriber. The subscriber may be charged a fee for use of the requested on demand translation service or may be provided use of the on demand translation service for free in exchange for displaying commercial messages to the subscriber. A video signal may be received including information in the source language, which may be obtained as text from the video signal and may be translated from the source language to the target language by use of the translation module. Translated information, based on the translated text, may be added into the received video signal.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for using a classifier for processing a query are disclosed. For example, the method receives a query from a user, and processes the query to locate one or more documents in accordance with a search engine having a discriminative classifier, wherein the discriminative classifier is trained with a plurality of artificial query examples. The method then presents a result of the processing to the user.

Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media relate to performing a search. A system configured to practice the method first receives from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system a word lattice based on speech query and receives indexed documents from an information repository. The system composes, based on the word lattice and the indexed documents, at least one triple including a query word, selected indexed document, and weight. The system generates an N-best path through the word lattice based on the at least one triple and re-ranks ASR output based on the N-best path. The system aggregates each weight across the query words to generate N-best listings and returns search results to the speech query based on the re-ranked ASR output and the N-best listings. The lattice can be a confusion network, the arc density of which can be adjusted for a desired performance level.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for improving speech recognition accuracy using textual context. The method includes retrieving a recorded utterance, capturing text from a device display associated with the spoken dialog and viewed by one party to the recorded utterance, and identifying words in the captured text that are relevant to the recorded utterance. The method further includes adding the identified words to a dynamic language model, and recognizing the recorded utterance using the dynamic language model. The recorded utterance can be a spoken dialog. A time stamp can be assigned to each identified word. The method can include adding identified words to and/or removing identified words from the dynamic language model based on their respective time stamps. A screen scraper can capture text from the device display associated with the recorded utterance. The device display can contain customer service data.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for collecting web data in order to create diverse language models. A system configured to practice the method first crawls, such as via a crawler operating on a computing device, a set of documents in a network of interconnected devices according to a visitation policy, wherein the visitation policy is configured to focus on novelty regions for a current language model built from previous crawling cycles by crawling documents whose vocabulary considered likely to fill gaps in the current language model. A language model from a previous cycle can be used to guide the creation of a language model in the following cycle. The novelty regions can include documents with high perplexity values over the current language model.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for receiving a user's spoken search query that the system will incrementally recognize and identify search terms. After the query has been incrementally recognized, the system will use the search terms to retrieve a portion of the search results that are based on usable identified search terms. As the results are found, the system will then output at least part at least part of the retrieved portion of search results on the display prior to the user concluding his or her search query.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for presenting a machine translation and alternative translations to a user, where a selection of any particular alternative translation results in the re-ranking of the remaining alternatives. The system then presents these re-ranked alternatives to the user, who can continue proofing the machine translation using the re-ranked alternatives or by typing an improved translation. This process continues until the user indicates that the current portion of the translation is complete, at which point the system moves to the next portion.

Abstract: A method, a system and a machine-readable medium are provided for an on demand translation service. A translation module including at least one language pair module for translating a source language to a target language may be made available for use by a subscriber. The subscriber may be charged a fee for use of the requested on demand translation service or may be provided use of the on demand translation service for free in exchange for displaying commercial messages to the subscriber. A video signal may be received including information in the source language, which may be obtained as text from the video signal and may be translated from the source language to the target language by use of the translation module. Translated information, based on the translated text, may be added into the received video signal.

Abstract: A system, method and computer-readable storage devices are for processing natural language commands, such as commands to a robotic arm, using a Tag & Parse approach to semantic parsing. The system first assigns semantic tags to each word in a sentence and then parses the tag sequence into a semantic tree. The system can use statistical approach for tagging, parsing, and reference resolution. Each stage can produce multiple hypotheses, which are re-ranked using spatial validation. Then the system selects a most likely hypothesis after spatial validation, and generates or outputs a command. In the case of a robotic arm, the command is output in Robot Control Language (RCL).

Abstract: A system and method are disclosed that improve automatic speech recognition in a spoken dialog system. The method comprises partitioning speech recognizer output into self-contained clauses, identifying a dialog act in each of the self-contained clauses, qualifying dialog acts by identifying a current domain object and/or a current domain action, and determining whether further qualification is possible for the current domain object and/or current domain action. If further qualification is possible, then the method comprises identifying another domain action and/or another domain object associated with the current domain object and/or current domain action, reassigning the another domain action and/or another domain object as the current domain action and/or current domain object and then recursively qualifying the new current domain action and/or current object. This process continues until nothing is left to qualify.

Abstract: An aspect of the present disclosure provides a convenient user interface for interactively viewing the qualifications of people maintained in an ERP system. In an embodiment, a group of qualifications are displayed on a display screen. The user then provides identity of a person of interest. Only those of the qualifications possessed by the user are highlighted on the display screen. The user can select a different user to have the corresponding (possessed) qualifications highlighted. According to another aspect of the present disclosure, the user first selects a list of persons of interest. The list of such selected persons are also displayed on a portion of the display screen along with the qualifications in other portions. According to yet another aspect when a displayed qualification is selected, those of the displayed persons possessing the selected qualification are highlighted.