In the recognition of coherently spoken words, a plurality of hypotheses is usually built up which end in various words during the recognition process and are then to be continued with further words. To keep the number of words yet to be continued as small as possible, especially in the case of a large vocabulary, it is known to carry out a look-ahead in a limited time space. It is suggested according to the invention to use the same phonemes for the look-ahead as for the actual recognition and to add together the differential sums obtained in the look-ahead for the evaluation of the partial hypothesis which has just ended and which is to be continued, and to compare this sum with a threshold value which depends on the extrapolated minimum total evaluation at the end of the time space of the look-ahead. The searching space for hypotheses to be continued can be limited by this in a particularly favorable manner.
Speech recognition apparatus and method using look-ahead scoring