Patent ID: 7299179

Claim:
A method for speech recognition, comprising: assigning a phoneme-containing sequence to a speech unit by a phoneme recognizer; selecting vocabulary entries similar to the phoneme-containing sequence from a selection vocabulary; recognizing the speech unit by a speech unit recognizer, wherein a recognition vocabulary of the speech unit recognizer contains the selected vocabulary entries which are similar to the phoneme-containing sequence, wherein, for the purpose of selecting the vocabulary entries which are similar to the phoneme-containing sequence, the phoneme-containing sequence is split up into phoneme units; determining the frequency of occurrence of each phoneme unit in the corresponding vocabulary entry; forming a set which is the union of all such vocabulary entries having at least one phoneme unit in common with the speech unit, and of a corresponding frequency measure representing how often the phoneme units of the speech unit occur in the corresponding vocabulary entry; and normalizing the frequency measure relative to a length of the speech unit and to a length of the corresponding vocabulary entry, wherein the recognition vocabulary is selected from the union set on the basis of the normalized frequency measure.