Appeal No. 1996-2198
Application 08/077,506
DECISION ON APPEAL
This is an appeal from the final rejection of claims 1-5,
all of the pending claims, under the first and second
paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. § 112 and under § 103. We reverse.
A. The invention
The invention at issue is described by appellants as an
improvement in reference pattern generators using the hidden
Markov model (HMM) and more particularly as an improvement in
Rabiner-Levinson-type speech recognition systems (Brief at 3).
By way of background, appellant's brief describes HMMs
having a discrete number of states N and a discrete number of
symbols M (Brief at 9). A particular HMM is defined by:
(1) A, the state transition probability distribution {a }
ij
which defines the probability that the next state would be j,
given that the current state is i;
(2) B, the occurrence probability distribution {b (k)}
j
which defines the probability of observing (k) given that the
state is j; and
-2-
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