Patent ID: 8315869

Claim:
A speech recognition apparatus for recognizing a plurality of sequentially associated words contained in an inputted speech, and outputting recognition results thereof, comprising: an acoustic model reading part for reading an acoustic model previously recorded in an auxiliary storage into a main storage; a dictionary management part for reading dictionary data that includes a beginning part dictionary representing beginning parts of a group of words to be candidates of a word to be recognized, an ending part dictionary representing ending parts of the group of words, word order data representing a word order, and correspondence data representing a correspondence between the beginning part dictionary and the ending part dictionary, from the auxiliary storage into the main storage; and a recognition part for successively recognizing the plurality of sequentially associated words contained in the inputted speech by matching the group of words represented by the beginning part dictionary and the ending part dictionary read into the main storage with the inputted speech, using the acoustic model and the correspondence data read into the main storage, wherein the dictionary data contains at least one beginning part dictionary storing data representing a plurality of beginning parts of words, and a group of ending part dictionaries storing data representing a group of ending parts corresponding to a group of beginning parts represented by the beginning part dictionary as a plurality of ending part dictionaries, and wherein the dictionary management part reads the word order data and the beginning part dictionary containing beginning parts of a group of words to be candidates of at least one word among the words contained in the inputted speech into the main storage, and at same moment with recognizing an N-th (N is a natural number) word in the inputted speech using the beginning part dictionary, reads the ending part dictionary and/or the beginning part dictionary for an (N+1)-th word in the inputted speech that follows the N-th word being recognized at the moment into the main storage based on the word order data.