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IP: NSA patents voice recognition technology
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 02:29:30 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com> [I once worked on a project at Carnegie Mellon that used the Sphinx voice recognition system developed in the school of computer science. (I did the user interface and database.) It's hardly a surprise that the US government wants to be able to do this, and probably funded that CMU project, though I no longer remember one way or another. Hmm. I wonder what the NSA could use this patent for? --DBM] === http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Features/spies151199.shtml The US National Security Agency has patented a new technology for monitoring millions of telephone calls, so watch out, it's now even easier for the spooks to eavesdrop on your conversations http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1& u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,937,422'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,937,422&RS= PN/5,937,422 United States Patent 5,937,422 Nelson , et al. August 10, 1999 Automatically generating a topic description for text and searching and sorting text by topic using the same Abstract A method of automatically generating a topical description of text by receiving the text containing input words; stemming each input word to its root form; assigning a user-definable part-of-speech score to each input word; assigning a language salience score to each input word; assigning an input-word score to each input word; creating a tree structure under each input word, where each tree structure contains the definition of the corresponding input word; assigning a definition-word score to each definition word; collapsing each tree structure to a corresponding tree-word list; assigning a tree-word-list score to each entry in each tree-word list; combining the tree-word lists into a final word list; assigning each word in the final word list a final-word-list score; and choosing the top N scoring words in the final word list as the topic description of the input text. Document searching and sorting may be accomplished by performing the method described above on each document in a database and then comparing the similarity of the resulting topical descriptions. Inventors: Nelson; Douglas J. (Columbia, MD); Schone; Patrick John (Elkridge, MD); Bates; Richard Michael (Greenbelt, MD) Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the National Security (Washington, DC) [...] FIELD OF THE INVENTION This invention relates to information processing and, more particularly, to automatically generating a topic description for text and searching and sorting text by topic using the same. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION Identifying topics of text has been an area of study for several years, and identifying such in unconstrained speech has been an area of growing interest. The latter of these two areas, however, seems to be more difficult since much of the information conveyed in speech is never actually spoken and since utterances frequently are less coherent than written language. The standard method of electronically searching for a document related to a particular topic is by using keywords. In a keyword search, a user selects a small set of words (i.e., the keywords) which may be expected to occur in documents related to the topic of interest. The documents are then searched for occurrences of the keywords. Documents containing the keywords are then presented to the user. A disadvantage of this method is that relevant documents that do not include the keywords will not be retrieved. [...] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to majordomo () vorlon mit edu with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- IP: NSA patents voice recognition technology Dave Farber (Nov 15)