SPEECH RECOGNITION METHOD AND APPARATUS

Concerned is speech recognition that reference speech information is extracted from a plurality of speech recognition dictionaries in a hierarchical structure to compare between extracted reference speech information and an inputted speech thereby recognizing the speech. Reference speech information representative of hierarchical-level skipping is prepared in a predetermined speech recognition dictionary so that, when recognizing an input corresponding to the reference speech information representative of hierarchical-level skipping, speech recognition is carried out by extracting a part of speech recognition dictionary belonging to a lower hierarchical level of the reference speech information being compared.