Patent ID: 7310601

Claim:
A speech recognition apparatus which obtains and recognizes speech, said apparatus comprising: a language model storage unit operable to store language models for recognizing speech; a word obtainment unit operable to obtain one of a plurality of words; a specific probability derivation unit operable to derive, for each of the language models, a specific model probability which is a probability that a predetermined word appears next to the word obtained by said word obtainment unit, based on the language model; a tag information storage unit operable to store a piece of tag information for each of the language models, the tag information indicating a feature of each language model; a relevance degree holding unit operable to hold a relevance degree between each piece of tag information and each of the words; an importance degree holding unit operable to hold an importance degree of each piece of tag information to a corresponding one of the language models; a relevance degree derivation unit operable to derive the relevance degree between each piece of tag information and the word obtained by said word obtainment unit, from the respective relevance degrees held by said relevance degree holding unit; a combination coefficient calculation unit operable to calculate, as a combination coefficient, a weight of each language model which corresponds to the obtained word, based on relevance degrees derived by said relevance degree derivation unit between each piece of tag information and the obtained word, and the importance degrees held by said importance degree holding unit, each of the relevance degrees indicating a relevance degree between the obtained word and one of the pieces of tag information of each language model; a probability calculation unit operable to calculate a probability that the predetermined word appears next to the obtained word by calculating, for each of the language models, a product of the specific model probability and the combination coefficient, and by adding the obtained products of the respective language models, the specific model probability corresponding to the language model derived by said specific probability derivation unit, and the combination coefficient corresponding to the language model calculated by said combination coefficient calculation unit; and a recognition unit operable to recognize the speech by using the probability calculated by said probability calculation unit, wherein said word obtainment unit is operable to obtain the one of the words adapted to the speech recognized by said recognition unit.