IP: NSA patents voice recognition technology

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>
>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.
>
>[...]
>
>
>
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