Patent ID: 6983247

Claim:
A method of automatically recognizing speech, comprising: providing a language model comprising a plurality of n-grams, each n-gram comprising a sequence of n augmented words, each augmented word comprising a word and a tag encoding lexical information regarding the word, the language model further comprising a probability indicator corresponding to each n-gram, each probability indicator indicative of a probability that, given an occurrence of a first n- 1 words of the corresponding n-gram in a block of text, an immediately fbllowing word in the block of text will be the n th word of the n-gram; hypothesizing a sequence of n- 1 augmented words, each hypothesized augmented word comprising a hypothesized word and a tag encoding lexical information regarding the hypothesized word; comparing the hypothesized sequence to the first n- 1 words of a selected n-gram; and if the hypothesized sequence matches the first n- 1 augmented words of the selected n-gram, accessing the probability indicator corresponding to the selected n-gram to determine the probability that the word immediately following the hypothesized sequence in a block of text will be the n th augmented word of the selected n-gram.