Patents by Inventor Jerome R. Bellegarda

Jerome R. Bellegarda 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: 8015012
    Abstract: Portions from segment boundary regions of a plurality of speech segments are extracted. Each segment boundary region is based on a corresponding initial unit boundary. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. For each of a plurality of potential unit boundaries within each segment boundary region, an average discontinuity based on distances between the feature vectors is determined. For each segment, the potential unit boundary associated with a minimum average discontinuity is selected as a new unit boundary.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 28, 2008
    Date of Patent: September 6, 2011
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7930172
    Abstract: Portions from time-domain speech segments are extracted. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. The feature vectors incorporate phase information of the portions. A distance between the feature vectors in the vector space is determined. In one aspect, the feature vectors are created by constructing a matrix W from the portions and decomposing the matrix W. In one aspect, decomposing the matrix W comprises extracting global boundary-centric features from the portions. In one aspect, the portions include at least one pitch period. In another aspect, the portions include centered pitch periods.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 8, 2009
    Date of Patent: April 19, 2011
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Publication number: 20110004475
    Abstract: Exemplary embodiments of methods and apparatuses for automatic speech recognition are described. First model parameters associated with a first representation of an input signal are generated. The first representation of the input signal is a discrete parameter representation. Second model parameters associated with a second representation of the input signal are generated. The second representation of the input signal includes a continuous parameter representation of residuals of the input signal. The first representation of the input signal includes discrete parameters representing first portions of the input signal. The second representation includes discrete parameters representing second portions of the input signal that are smaller than the first portions. Third model parameters are generated to couple the first representation of the input signal with the second representation of the input signal. The first representation and the second representation of the input signal are mapped into a vector space.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 2, 2009
    Publication date: January 6, 2011
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7856479
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for filtering messages comprising determining a first semantic anchor corresponding to a first group of messages, for example, legitimate messages and a second semantic anchor corresponding to a second group of messages, for example, unsolicited messages. Determining a vector corresponding to an incoming message; comparing the vector corresponding to the incoming message with at least one of the first semantic anchor and the second semantic anchor to obtain a first comparison value and a second comparison value; and filtering the incoming message based on the first comparison value and the second comparison value.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 20, 2006
    Date of Patent: December 21, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Devang Naik, Kim E. A. Silverman
  • Patent number: 7849141
    Abstract: A method, apparatus, and signal-bearing medium that files data in a destination based on one or more criteria. In various embodiments, the data may be email, email attachments, faxes, telephone messages, downloaded data or programs, audio, video, scanned images, photographs, blocks of text, or other data. In an embodiment, a training mode and an automatic mode are provided. During the training mode, a user is presented with data and a recommended destination, and the user provides feedback that is used to train the criteria. During an automatic mode, the data may be transferred to the destination with or without user confirmation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 30, 2004
    Date of Patent: December 7, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Scott Forstall, Kim E. A. Silverman, Kevin Tiene, Bertrand Serlet
  • Patent number: 7836135
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for filtering messages comprising determining a first semantic anchor corresponding to a first group of messages, for example, legitimate messages and a second semantic anchor corresponding to a second group of messages, for example, unsolicited messages. Determining a vector corresponding to an incoming message; comparing the vector corresponding to the incoming message with at least one of the first semantic anchor and the second semantic anchor to obtain a first comparison value and a second comparison value; and filtering the incoming message based on the first comparison value and the second comparison value.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 9, 2006
    Date of Patent: November 16, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Devang Naik, Kim E. A. Silverman
  • Patent number: 7778819
    Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided for generating speech that sounds more natural. Determining whether information in a current sentence is new or previously given is performed based on a semantic relationship between the current sentence and a number of preceding sentences. A word prominence for the synthetic speech to a word in the current sentence is assigned in accordance with the information determination. A speech representative of the current sentence can be generated. In one embodiment, word prominence and latent semantic analysis are used to generate more natural sounding speech. A method for generating speech that sounds more natural may comprise generating synthesized speech having certain word prominence characteristics and applying a semantically-driven word prominence assignment model to specify word prominence consistent with the way humans assign word prominence.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 4, 2007
    Date of Patent: August 17, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Kim E. A. Silverman
  • Publication number: 20100145691
    Abstract: Portions from time-domain speech segments are extracted. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. The feature vectors incorporate phase information of the portions. A distance between the feature vectors in the vector space is determined. In one aspect, the feature vectors are created by constructing a matrix W from the portions and decomposing the matrix W. In one aspect, decomposing the matrix W comprises extracting global boundary-centric features from the portions. In one aspect, the portions include at least one pitch period. In another aspect, the portions include centered pitch periods.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 8, 2009
    Publication date: June 10, 2010
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7720673
    Abstract: A method and system for dynamic language modeling of a document are described. In one embodiment, a number of local probabilities of a current document are computed and a vector representation of the current document in a latent semantic analysis (LSA) space is determined. In addition, a number of global probabilities based upon the vector representation of the current document in an LSA space is computed. Further, the local probabilities and the global probabilities are combined to produce the language modeling.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 23, 2007
    Date of Patent: May 18, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7702509
    Abstract: Pronunciation for an input word is modeled by generating a set of candidate phoneme strings having pronunciations close to the input word in an orthographic space. Phoneme sub-strings in the set are selected as the pronunciation. In one aspect, a first closeness measure between phoneme strings for words chosen from a dictionary and contexts within the input word is used to determine the candidate phoneme strings. The words are chosen from the dictionary based on a second closeness measure between a representation of the input word in the orthographic space and orthographic anchors corresponding to the words in the dictionary. In another aspect, the phoneme sub-strings are selected by aligning the candidate phoneme strings on common phoneme sub-strings to produce an occurrence count, which is used to choose the phoneme sub-strings for the pronunciation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 21, 2006
    Date of Patent: April 20, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7643990
    Abstract: Portions from time-domain speech segments are extracted. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. The feature vectors incorporate phase information of the portions. A distance between the feature vectors in the vector space is determined. In one aspect, the feature vectors are created by constructing a matrix W from the portions and decomposing the matrix W. In one aspect, decomposing the matrix W comprises extracting global boundary-centric features from the portions. In one aspect, the portions include at least one pitch period. In another aspect, the portions include centered pitch periods.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 23, 2003
    Date of Patent: January 5, 2010
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7640305
    Abstract: A method, apparatus, and signal-bearing medium that filter data based on a criteria. In an embodiment, the criteria may be related to filtering out unwanted or junk input data. In another embodiment, the criteria may be related to filtering based on desired data. In various embodiments, the data may be email, email attachments, faxes, popup windows, telephone messages, downloaded data or programs, image data, or other data. In a embodiment, a training mode and an automatic mode are provided. During the training mode, a user may be presented with data that may be junk, and feedback may be provided that is used to train a junk filter. During an automatic mode, junk data may be removed from view, transferred to a junk box, or highlighted.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 5, 2003
    Date of Patent: December 29, 2009
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Bruce Arthur, Paul Marcos, Greg Christie, Jerome R Bellegarda, Kim E. A. Silverman, Scott Forstall, Kevin Tiene
  • Publication number: 20090048836
    Abstract: Portions from segment boundary regions of a plurality of speech segments are extracted. Each segment boundary region is based on a corresponding initial unit boundary. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. For each of a plurality of potential unit boundaries within each segment boundary region, an average discontinuity based on distances between the feature vectors is determined. For each segment, the potential unit boundary associated with a minimum average discontinuity is selected as a new unit boundary.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 28, 2008
    Publication date: February 19, 2009
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7409347
    Abstract: Portions from segment boundary regions of a plurality of speech segments are extracted. Each segment boundary region is based on a corresponding initial unit boundary. Feature vectors that represent the portions in a vector space are created. For each of a plurality of potential unit boundaries within each segment boundary region, an average discontinuity based on distances between the feature vectors is determined. For each segment, the potential unit boundary associated with a minimum average discontinuity is selected as a new unit boundary.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 23, 2003
    Date of Patent: August 5, 2008
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Publication number: 20080091428
    Abstract: The present invention provides, among other things, automatic identification of near-redundant units in a large TTS voice table, identifying which units are distinctive enough to keep and which units are sufficiently redundant to discard. According to an aspect of the invention, pruning is treated as a clustering problem in a suitable feature space. All instances of a given unit (e.g. word or characters expressed as Unicode strings) are mapped onto the feature space, and cluster units in that space using a suitable similarity measure. Since all units in a given cluster are, by construction, closely related from the point of view of the measure used, they are suitably redundant and can be replaced by a single instance. The disclosed method can detect near-redundancy in TTS units in a completely unsupervised manner, based on an original feature extraction and clustering strategy.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 10, 2006
    Publication date: April 17, 2008
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7353164
    Abstract: An orthographic anchor for each word in a dictionary is created in an orthographic space by mapping the words and a set of letter patterns characteristic of the words into the orthographic space. In one aspect the orthographic anchors are row or column vectors resulting from a decomposition of a matrix of feature vectors created by the mapping. In another aspect, a pronunciation for an input word is modeled based on a set of candidate phoneme strings that have pronunciations close to the input word in the orthographic space.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 13, 2002
    Date of Patent: April 1, 2008
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda
  • Patent number: 7313523
    Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided for generating speech that sounds more natural. In one embodiment, word prominence and latent semantic analysis are used to generate more natural sounding speech. A method for generating speech that sounds more natural may comprise generating synthesized speech having certain word prominence characteristics and applying a semantically-driven word prominence assignment model to specify word prominence consistent with the way humans assign word prominence. A speech representative of a current sentence is generated. The determination is made whether information in the current sentence is new or previously given in accordance with a semantic relationship between the current sentence and a number of preceding sentences. A word prominence is assigned to a word in the current sentence in accordance with the information determination.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 14, 2003
    Date of Patent: December 25, 2007
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Kim E. A. Silverman
  • Patent number: 7289950
    Abstract: An extended finite state grammar structure is generated from a finite state grammar. The extended finite state grammar structure includes word subgraphs representing a set of pre-defined word strings for words in the finite state grammar, and a set of all possible word strings for the words. The extended finite state grammar structure can be used to transform audio input into one or more of the word strings.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 21, 2004
    Date of Patent: October 30, 2007
    Assignee: Apple Inc.
    Inventors: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Kim E. A. Silverman
  • Publication number: 20070192105
    Abstract: Methods, apparatus, systems, and computer program products are provided for synthesizing speech. One method includes matching a first level of units of a received input string to audio segments from a plurality of audio segments including using properties of or between first level units to locate matching audio segments from a plurality of selections, parsing unmatched first level units into second level units, matching the second level units to audio segments using properties of or between the units to locate matching audio segments from a plurality of selections and synthesizing the input string, including combining the audio segments associated with the first and second units.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 16, 2006
    Publication date: August 16, 2007
    Inventors: Matthias Neeracher, Devang K. Naik, Kevin B. Aitken, Jerome R. Bellegarda, Kim E.A. Silverman
  • Patent number: 7191118
    Abstract: A method and system for dynamic language modeling of a document are described. In one embodiment, a number of local probabilities of a current document are computed and a vector representation of the current document in a latent semantic analysis (LSA) space is determined. In addition, a number of global probabilities based upon the vector representation of the current document in an LSA space is computed. Further, the local probabilities and the global probabilities are combined to produce the language modeling.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 12, 2004
    Date of Patent: March 13, 2007
    Assignee: Apple, Inc.
    Inventor: Jerome R. Bellegarda