Stephen W Austin

US Patent:

52416194, Aug 31, 1993

Filed:

Jun 25, 1991

Appl. No.:

7/720652

Inventors:

Richard M. Schwartz - Sudbury MA
Stephen C. Austin - Watertown MA

Assignee:

Bolt Beranek And Newman Inc. - Cambridge MA

International Classification:

G10L 900

US Classification:

395 2

Abstract:

As a step in finding the one most likely word sequence in a spoken language system, an N-best search is conducted to find the N most likely sentence hypotheses. During the search, word theories are distinguished based only on the one previous word. At each state within a word, the total probability is calculated for each of a few previous words. At the end of each word, the probability score is recorded for each previous word theory, together with the name of the previous word. At the end of the sentence, a recursive traceback is performed to derive the list of the N best sentences.