SPEECH RECOGNITION DIVIDING WORDS INTO TWO PORTIONS FOR PRELIMINARY SELECTION

A speech recognition apparatus makes a preliminary selection of a number of candidate words from a vocabulary of words, one of which candidate words is most likely the spoken word to be recognized. For the preliminary selection, each candiate word is divided into first and second portions. For each portion of a word, there are stored probabilites of producing each label of a label alphabet during the utterance of that portion of the word. The speech to be recognized is also divided into first and second portions. A label string representing the speech to be recognized is generated, such that labels occur during the first or the second portion of the speech (or during a transition between the first and second portions. To determine the likelihood that the spoken word represents a word from the vocabulary, each label occurring during the first portion is assigned its "first portion" probability. Each label occurring during the second portion is assigned its "second portion" probability.