FC: NSA patents voice recognition technology

[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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