Patent application number | Description | Published |
20090150153 | GRAPHEME-TO-PHONEME CONVERSION USING ACOUSTIC DATA - Described is the use of acoustic data to improve grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for speech recognition, such as to more accurately recognize spoken names in a voice-dialing system. A joint model of acoustics and graphonemes (acoustic data, phonemes sequences, grapheme sequences and an alignment between phoneme sequences and grapheme sequences) is described, as is retraining by maximum likelihood training and discriminative training in adapting graphoneme model parameters using acoustic data. Also described is the unsupervised collection of grapheme labels for received acoustic data, thereby automatically obtaining a substantial number of actual samples that may be used in retraining. Speech input that does not meet a confidence threshold may be filtered out so as to not be used by the retrained model. | 06-11-2009 |
20090248422 | INTRA-LANGUAGE STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION - Training data may be provided, the training data including pairs of source phrases and target phrases. The pairs may be used to train an intra-language statistical machine translation model, where the intra-language statistical machine translation model, when given an input phrase of text in the human language, can compute probabilities of semantic equivalence of the input phrase to possible translations of the input phrase in the human language. The statistical machine translation model may be used to translate between queries and listings. The queries may be text strings in the human language submitted to a search engine. The listing strings may be text strings of formal names of real world entities that are to be searched by the search engine to find matches for the query strings. | 10-01-2009 |
20090327260 | CONSTRUCTING A CLASSIFIER FOR CLASSIFYING QUERIES - To construct a classifier, a data structure correlating queries to items identified by the queries is received, where the data structure contains initial labeled queries that have been labeled with respect to predetermined classes, and unlabeled queries that have not been labeled with respect to the predetermined classes. The data structure is used to label at least some of the unlabeled queries with respect to the predetermined classes. Queries in the data structure that have been labeled with respect to the predetermined classes are used as training data to train the classifier. | 12-31-2009 |
20100076765 | STRUCTURED MODELS OF REPITITION FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION - Described is a technology by which a structured model of repetition is used to determine the words spoken by a user, and/or a corresponding database entry, based in part on a prior utterance. For a repeated utterance, a joint probability analysis is performed on (at least some of) the corresponding word sequences as recognized by one or more recognizers) and associated acoustic data. For example, a generative probabilistic model, or a maximum entropy model may be used in the analysis. The second utterance may be a repetition of the first utterance using the exact words, or another structural transformation thereof relative to the first utterance, such as an extension that adds one or more words, a truncation that removes one or more words, or a whole or partial spelling of one or more words. | 03-25-2010 |
20100268725 | ACQUISITION OF SEMANTIC CLASS LEXICONS FOR QUERY TAGGING - A user's search experience may be enhanced by providing additional content based upon an understanding of the user's intent. Query tagging, the assigning of semantic labels to terms within a query, is one technique that may be utilized to determine the context of a user's search query. Accordingly, as provided herein, a query tagging model may be updated using one or more stratified lexicons. A list data structure (e.g., lists of phrases obtained from web pages) and seed distribution data (e.g., pre-labeled probability data) may be used by a graph learning technique to obtain an expanded set of phrases and their respective probabilities of corresponding with particular lexicons (e.g., semantic class lexicons). The expanded set of phrases may be used to group phrases into stratified lexicons. The stratified lexicons may be used as features for updating and/or executing the query tagging model. | 10-21-2010 |
20100312782 | PRESENTING SEARCH RESULTS ACCORDING TO QUERY DOMAINS - A query may be applied against search engines that respectively return a set of search results relating to various items discovered in the searched data sets. However, presenting numerous and varied search results may be difficult on mobile devices with small displays and limited computational resources. Instead, search results may be associated with search domains representing various information types (e.g., contacts, public figures, places, projects, movies, music, and books) and presented by grouping search results with associated query domains, e.g., in a tabbed user interface. The query may be received through an input device associated with a particular input domain, and may be transitioned to the query domain of a particular search engine (e.g., by recognizing phonemes of a voice query using an acoustic model; matching phonemes with query terms according to a pronunciation model; and generating a recognition result according to a vocabulary of an n-gram language model.) | 12-09-2010 |
20100318531 | SMOOTHING CLICKTHROUGH DATA FOR WEB SEARCH RANKING - Described is a technology for using clickthrough data (e.g., based on data of a query log) in learning a ranking model that may be used in online ranking of search results. Clickthrough data, which is typically sparse (because many documents are often not clicked or rarely clicked), is processed/smoothed into smoothed clickthrough streams. The processing includes determining similar queries for a document with incomplete (insufficient) clickthrough data to provide expanded clickthrough data for that document, and/or by estimating at least one clickthrough feature for a document when that document has missing (e.g., no) clickthrough data. Similar queries may be determined by random walk clustering and/or session-based query analysis. Features extracted from the clickthrough streams may be used to provide a ranking model which may then be used in online ranking of documents that are located with respect to a query. | 12-16-2010 |
20110125791 | QUERY CLASSIFICATION USING SEARCH RESULT TAG RATIOS - Techniques are described herein for classifying a search query with respect to query intent using search result tag ratios. A tag is a character or a combination of characters (e.g., one or more words) that indicates a property of a document, such as a topic of the document, a type of entity (i.e., subject matter) the document references, etc. A search result tag ratio is defined as a fraction (e.g., a proportion, a percentage, etc.) of the documents in a search result that includes a respective tag. A search query may be classified based on back-off ratios, which are tag ratios of search queries that are related to the search query to be classified. Tag ratios may be pre-computed (i.e., calculated before the corresponding search queries are received from users). | 05-26-2011 |
20110161260 | USER-DRIVEN INDEX SELECTION - Techniques for index building are described. Clickcounts of respective training URLs may indicate a number of times that corresponding training URLs were clicked in search engine results. A machine learning algorithm implemented on a computer computes a trained model that is then stored. The clickcounts and respective URLs are passed to the machine learning algorithm to train the model to predict probabilities based on feature vectors of URLs. An index of web pages is built for a set of URLs that identify the web pages. Feature vectors for the URLs are computed. Probabilities of the web pages of the URLs being searched in the future by users may be computed by processing the feature vectors with the trained model. The probabilities may be used to determine which of the URLs to include in the index. | 06-30-2011 |
20110251844 | GRAPHEME-TO-PHONEME CONVERSION USING ACOUSTIC DATA - Described is the use of acoustic data to improve grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for speech recognition, such as to more accurately recognize spoken names in a voice-dialing system. A joint model of acoustics and graphonemes (acoustic data, phonemes sequences, grapheme sequences and an alignment between phoneme sequences and grapheme sequences) is described, as is retraining by maximum likelihood training and discriminative training in adapting graphoneme model parameters using acoustic data. Also described is the unsupervised collection of grapheme labels for received acoustic data, thereby automatically obtaining a substantial number of actual samples that may be used in retraining. Speech input that does not meet a confidence threshold may be filtered out so as to not be used by the retrained model. | 10-13-2011 |
20110270815 | EXTRACTING STRUCTURED DATA FROM WEB QUERIES - Described is processing a web query into structured data, such as for use in formulating a database query. A classifier and segmental conditional random field (CRF) model classify and segment a query into labeled segments used to obtain the structured data. The structured data includes a class, an intent set corresponding to data sought by the query, and an attribute set corresponding to an attribute name and attribute value representing each modifier in the query. The structured data may be converted into a query language (e.g., SQL) query to query the structured data source; e.g., the class may be used to select a database, the attribute set used to find one or more columns and a row in the database, and the intent set matched to a column, whose row data is the result being sought. A web search engine may return the database query as part of its results. | 11-03-2011 |
20110307479 | Automatic Extraction of Structured Web Content - Described is extracting structured information from web pages for use in directly answering queries with data items from the structured data. Users' post-search browsing behaviors (search trails) are treated as implicit labels as to the relevance between web content and user queries, and are used to determine wrappers for extracting structured information. In one implementation, a system identifies websites from web search logs, builds wrappers from users' search trails, filters out bad wrappers (from inconsistent user clicks), and combines structured information from different web sites, e.g., for each query. | 12-15-2011 |
20110314003 | TEMPLATE CONCATENATION FOR CAPTURING MULTIPLE CONCEPTS IN A VOICE QUERY - Architecture that provides the capability to identify which parts (terms and phrases) of a voice query have been covered by predefined phrase templates, and then to concatenate matching phrase templates into a new paraphrased query. A match-drop-continue algorithm is disclosed that progressively masks out the portions (phrases, terms) of the query matched to the phrase templates. Ultimately, the matched phrase templates are accumulated and organized together dynamically into a rephrased version of the original voice query. A user interface is provided that allows the user to confirm/summarize the multiple concepts in a progressive manner. | 12-22-2011 |
20120158703 | SEARCH LEXICON EXPANSION - One or more techniques and/or systems are disclosed for creating an expanded or improved lexicon for use in search-based semantic tagging. A set of first documents can be identified using a set of first lexicon elements as queries, and one or more first document patterns can be extracted from the set of first documents. The document patterns can be used to find one or more second documents in a query log that comprise the document patterns, which are associated with query terms used to return the second documents. The query terms for the second documents can be extracted and used to expand the lexicon. Elements within the lexicon may be weighted based upon relevance to different query domains, for example. | 06-21-2012 |
20120323967 | Spelling Using a Fuzzy Pattern Search - A multimedia system configured to receive user input in the form of a spelled character sequence is provided. In one implementation, a spell mode is initiated, and a user spells a character sequence. The multimedia system performs spelling recognition and recognizes a sequence of character representations having a possible ambiguity resulting from any user and/or system errors. The sequence of character representations with the possible ambiguity yields multiple search keys. The multimedia system performs a fuzzy pattern search by scoring each target item from a finite dataset of target items based on the multiple search keys. One or more relevant items are ranked and presented to the user for selection, each relevant item being a target item that exceeds a relevancy threshold. The user selects the indented character sequence from the one or more relevant items. | 12-20-2012 |