Abstract: State-of-the-art speech recognition systems are trained using transcribed utterances, preparation of which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. The present invention is an iterative method for reducing the transcription effort for training in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Active learning aims at reducing the number of training examples to be labeled by automatically processing the unlabeled examples and then selecting the most informative ones with respect to a given cost function for a human to label. The method comprises automatically estimating a confidence score for each word of the utterance and exploiting the lattice output of a speech recognizer, which was trained on a small set of transcribed data. An utterance confidence score is computed based on these word confidence scores; then the utterances are selectively sampled to be transcribed using the utterance confidence scores.

Abstract: A system, method and computer-readable medium for practicing a method of emotion detection during a natural language dialog between a human and a computing device are disclosed. The method includes receiving an utterance from a user in a natural language dialog, receiving contextual information regarding the natural language dialog which is related to changes of emotion over time in the dialog, and detecting an emotion of the user based on the received contextual information. Examples of contextual information include, for example, differential statistics, joint statistics and distance statistics.

Abstract: A system, method and computer-readable medium for practicing a method of emotion detection during a natural language dialog between a human and a computing device are disclosed. The method includes receiving an utterance from a user in a natural language dialog, receiving contextual information regarding the natural language dialog which is related to changes of emotion over time in the dialog, and detecting an emotion of the user based on the received contextual information. Examples of contextual information include, for example, differential statistics, joint statistics and distance statistics.

Abstract: A system, method and computer-readable medium for practicing a method of emotion detection during a natural language dialog between a human and a computing device are disclosed. The method includes receiving an utterance from a user in a natural language dialog between a human and a computing device, receiving contextual information regarding the natural language dialog which is related to changes of emotion over time in the dialog, and detecting an emotion of the user based on the received contextual information. Examples of contextual information include, for example, differential statistics, joint statistics and distance statistics.