SPEECH PROCESSING DEVICE AND METHOD, AND PROGRAM FOR RECOGNITION OF OUT-OF-VOCABULARY WORDS IN CONTINUOUS SPEECH

A speech processing device and a speech processing method, a storage medium, and a program decreases deletion errors and increases a speech recognition rate. A network of words and syllables is generated, and the network has two kinds of paths: paths that do not contain a particular syllable and paths that contain the syllable at a position corresponding to a boundary between words. Thus, an optimal sub-word sequence on the network is selected for an input utterance.