Patent ID: 7181398

Claim:
A method for recognizing an input sequence of input words in a spoken input, comprising computer implemented steps of: generating a subword representation of the spoken input as a concatenated phoneme sequence, the subword representation including (i) subword unit tokens based on the spoken input and (ii) end of word markers that identify boundaries of hypothesized subword sequences that potentially match the input words in the spoken input; expanding the subword representation into a word graph of word candidates for the input words in the spoken input using a phoneme confusion matrix, each word candidate being phonetically similar to one of the hypothesized subword sequences, said expanding including enabling creation of words outside of a word vocabulary and generating a word transcription from phonemes of the spoken input; and determining a preferred sequence of word candidates based on the word graph, the word candidates sorted using a pronunciation distance metric, the preferred sequence of word candidates representing a most likely match to the spoken sequence of the input words.