Abstract: An arrangement for allowing “hands-free” access to DTMF-controlled systems, such as one's voice mail messaging systems, utilizes a speech-to-DTMF tone application that monitors the communication between the user and the DTMF-controlled system. A speech recognition unit is utilized to retrieve certain voice commands (e.g., “next”, “skip”, “repeat”, “forward”, etc.) when uttered by the user. The application then translates the received commands into the proper DTMF tone sequence used by the DTMF-controlled system and transmits the DTMF tones to the system. The application is particularly useful in the cell phone environment and avoids the necessity of the user to constantly switch between using the keypad and listening to messages/commands from the system.

Abstract: A system for understanding entries, such as speech, develops a classifier by employing prior knowledge with which a given corpus of training entries is enlarged threefold. The prior knowledge is embodied in a rule, combined from separate rules created for each label outputted by the classifier, each of which includes a weight measure p(x). A first a set of created entries for increasing the corpus of training entries is created by attaching all labels to each entry of the original corpus of training entries, with a weight &eegr;p(x), or &eegr;(1−p(x)), in association with each label that meets, or fails to meet, the condition specified for the label, &eegr; being a preselected positive number. The second set of is created by not attaching any of the labels to each of the original corpus of training entries, with a weight of &eegr;(1−p(x)), or &eegr;p(x), in association with each label that meets, or fails to meet, the condition specified for the label.

Abstract: A method of rapidly training an automatic speech recognizer as part of a spoken dialog system for an enterprise includes extracting information from enterprise emails, web site content, and/or speech or data records of interactions between customers and the enterprise. The method comprises extracting the relevant data to develop a domain-specific language model, generating an acoustic model from non-domain-specific data, combining the domain-specific language model with the non-domain-specific acoustic model to initially deploy the spoken dialog service, and adapting the language models as task-specific data becomes available.

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 arrangement for allowing “hands-free” access to DTMF-controlled systems, such as one's voice mail messaging systems, utilizes a speech-to-DTMF tone application that monitors the communication between the user and the DTMF-controlled system. A speech recognition unit is utilized to retrieve certain voice commands (e.g., “next”, “skip”, “repeat”, “forward”, etc.) when uttered by the user. The application then translates the received commands into the proper DTMF tone sequence used by the DTMF-controlled system and transmits the DTMF tones to the system. The application is particularly useful in the cell phone environment and avoids the necessity of the user to constantly switch between using the keypad and listening to messages/commands from the system.

Abstract: A system for automatically retrieving and reporting “message count” information to an individual that has multiple voice message mailboxes uses a database and associated speech recognition unit. The system launches phone calls to each of the user's voice mailboxes and the speech unit “listens” to the initial response message to capture the count information usually contained in the beginning of the reply. The system then collects the separate counts associated with each mailbox and sends a report of the counts to the user. The system may use telephone connections or data connections to communicate with the user.

Abstract: A method implemented on a computer for facilitating World Wide Web Searches and like database searches by combining search result documents, as provided by separate search engines in response to a query, into one single integrated list so as to produce a single document with a ranked list of pages, includes the steps of: (a) training the computer for each search engine by clustering training queries and building cluster centroids; (b) Assign weights to each cluster reflecting the number of relevant pages expected to be obtained by this search engine for queries similar to those in that cluster; (c) processing an incoming query by selecting, for each search engine, that cluster centroid that is most similar to the incoming query and returning the weight associated with the selected cluster as the weight of the current search engine; and (d) apportioning the N slots in the retrieved set according to the weights returned by each search engine.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method for facilitating World Wide Web Searches and like database searches by combining search result documents, as provided by separate search engines in response to a query, into one single integrated list so as to produce a single document with a ranked list of pages, by forming a set of selected queries, the queries including respective terms, for which selected queries relevance data from past data is known, herein referred to as training queries, in a vector space comprising all training queries, the relevance data comprising judgments by a user as to whether a page is appropriate for a query which retrieved it.