LOCATING AND CORRECTING ERRONEOUSLY RECOGNIZED PORTIONS OF UTTERRANCES BY RESCORING BASED ON TWO N-BEST LISTS

A method of repairing machine-recognized speech is comprised of the steps of receiving from a recognition engine a first n-best list of hypotheses and scores for each hypothesis generated in response to a primary utterance to be recognized. An error within the hypothesis having the highest score is located. Control signals are generated from the first n-best list which are input to the recognition engine to constrain the generation of a second n-best list of hypotheses, and scores for each hypothesis, in response to an event independent of the primary utterance. The scores for the hypotheses in the first n-best list are combined with the scores for the hypotheses in the second n-best list. The hypothesis having the highest combined score is selected as the replacement for the located error.