Patent US 5,455,889

The present invention relates to labelling of speech in a context-dependent speech recognition system. When labelling speech using context-dependent prototypes the phone context of a frame of speech needs to be aligned with the appropriate acoustic parameter vector. Since aligning a large amount of data is difficult if based upon arc ranks, the present invention aligns the data using context-independent acoustic prototypes. The phonetic context of each phone of the data is known. Therefore after the alignment step the acoustic parameter vectors are tagged with a corresponding phonetic context. Context-dependent prototype vectors exists for each label. For all labels the context-dependent prototype vectors having the same phonetic context as the tagged acoustic parameter vector are determined. For each label the probability of achieving the tagged acoustic parameter vector is determined given each of the context-dependent label prototype vectors having the same phonetic context as the tagged acoustic parameter vector. The label with the highest probability is associated with the context-dependent acoustic parameter vector.