<12) United States Patent (10) Patent N0.I US 6,879,956 B1 Honda et al. (45) Date of Patent: Apr. 12, 2005 (54) SPEECH RECOGNITION WITH FEEDBACK FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS FROM NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR ADAPTATION OF ACOUSTIC MODELS E; (1) (75) Inventors: Hitoshi Honda, Tokyo (JP); Masanori Omote, Kanagawa (JP); Hiroaki Ogawa, Chiba (JP); Hongchang Pao, OTHER PUBLICATIONS Tokyo (JP) Fu Qiuliang et al., “Chinese word recognition and under(73) Assignee: Sony Corporation, Tokyo (JP) standing with information feedback,” 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing, 1996, Oct. 14—18, 1996, vol. ( * ) Notice: Subject‘ to any disclaimer, the term of this 1, pp_ 737 10 74()_* patent 15 extended or adlusted under 35 Fu Qiuliang et al., “A close ring structure of speech recogUSC 154b b 921d ' ' ' ( ) Y aye" nition and understanding,” 1997 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Processing Systems, 1997, Oct. 28-31, (21) Appl. No. 09/676,644 1997,v61., 2, pp. 1769 16 1772* (22) Filed: Sep. 29, 2000 (Continued) (30) Foreign Application Priority Data _ _ ( ) Primary Exami/1er—R1chemond Dorvil Sep. 30, 1999 JP ......................................... .. 11-277745 Assistant Examiner_Martin Lerner (51) Int. C1.’ ........................ .. G10L 15/06; G10L 15/18 $4) AIf’Ifl';'_1*’€;_11‘_‘8@”§ lg’ Fi"”_—SFY°1111111“’S‘ LLaW‘°“°° & (52) U.S. Cl. ...................................... .. 704/244, 704/257 “lg > 1 lam " ‘°mm°‘> am“ " 6° (58) Field of Search ............................... .. 704/231, 243, (57) ABSTRACT 704/244, 251, 255, 257, 1, 9 A h _ _ _ f h _ _ speec recognition unit per orms speec recognition on (56) Rgfgrgncgs (jited input speech based on models, such as HMMs, and supplies a speech recognition result to a dialog management unit. The US: PATENT DOCUMENTS dialog management unit forms a reply to the speech recog574287707 A 6/1995 Gould ct a1_ nition result. In this. case, the dialog management unit 5,687,288 A * 11/1997 DODICI 61 61. ............. .. 704/244 d@I@¢IS 101195 111 Whlch the Speech fewgnlilon result 15 5,748,841 A * 5/1998 Morin er a1, __ 704/257 correct based on the speech recognition result and the 5,852,801 A * 12/1998 Hon et al. ...... .. 704/244 associated reply, and feeds them back to the speech recog6,253,131 B1 * 6/2001 Junqua ~~~~~~~~~ ~~ 704/255 nition unit. Then, the speech recognition unit performs 6372362 B1 : 8/2001 Nguyen ct a1~ 704/244 on-line adaptation of the models based on the speech of the * granz et Eel """ " 7035243; correct zones fed back from the dialog management unit and , , respo e a . ~ ~ ~ 6,415,257 B1 * 7/2002 Junqua et 61. ............ .. 704/275 the “Seemed Speech reeegnmen result‘ 6,505,155 B1 * 1/2003 Vanbuskirk et al. ...... .. 704/246 6,799,162 B1 * 9/2004 Goronzy et al. .......... .. 704/244 8 Claims, 31 Drawing Sheets iv [SPEECH RECOGNITION PROCESSING) S1 1/ (DIALOG PROCESSING) S2 if RECOGNITIO <RESULT IS 0qORRECT?
TRANSMIT CORRECT S4
SPEECH ZONE
