Abstract: In order to achieve low error rates in a speech recognition system, for example, in a system employing rank-based decoding, we discriminate the most confusable incorrect leaves from the correct leaf by lowering their ranks. That is, we increase the likelihood of the correct leaf of a frame, while decreasing the likelihoods of the confusable leaves. In order to do this, we use the auxiliary information from the prediction of the neighboring frames to augment the likelihood computation of the current frame. We then use the residual errors in the predictions of neighboring frames to discriminate between the correct (best) and incorrect leaves of a given frame. We present a new methodology that incorporates prediction error likelihoods into the overall likelihood computation to improve the rank position of the correct leaf.

Abstract: A method for fast match processing, comprising two stages, a pre-processing stage and an on-line stage. The pre-processing stage comprises the steps of computing an a-priori probability of occurrence for each word from an acoustic vocabulary; deriving a penalty score for each word from said acoustic vocabulary based on each words a-priori probability of occurrence in an input text. The on-line stage operates on an input text stream, comprising the steps of, computing a path score for each word from said input text; combining the computed path score with the derived penalty score to form a combined score and testing the combined score against a threshold to determine top ranking candidate words.

Abstract: A messaging system for receiving speech over a telephone and converting the speech to text includes a first server for receiving speech input by a user, a speech recognition system for converting the speech to text, a speech synthesizer for converting the text to speech for playing back the synthesized speech for correction by the user and a correction mechanism for enabling the user to correct the speech such that the corrected speech is provided as text for transmittal over a communication system.