Speech recognition apparatus and word dictionary therefor

A word dictionary adapted for use on a speech apparatus which recognizes an input word by collating an acoustic feature pattern of the input word with acoustic feature patterns of words stored in a word dictionary, said word dictionary comprising:

• a recording medium;
• subword sequences of words stored in said recording medium;
• and
• information indicating an importance of each subword in each of the subword sequences which form the words, said information being stored in said recording medium together with said subword sequences,
• said importance indicating whether or not each subword of each word is an important factor when recognizing the input word on the speech recognition apparatus, and
• said importance being independent for each word.

A speech recognition apparatus comprising:

• a word dictionary storing and managing subword sequences of words, and information indicating an importance of each subword in each subword sequence, the importance indicating whether the subwords of each word are an important factor for word recognition, and the importance including at least an accent of each subword;
• managing means for managing standard values of acoustic feature patterns of each subword;
• generating means, coupled to said word dictionary and said managing means, for successively reading the subword sequences stored in said word dictionary and for generating acoustic feature patterns of each word using the standard values managed by said managing means;
• and
• collating means coupled to said word dictionary and said generating means, for calculating and evaluating distances between an acoustic feature pattern of an input word that is to be recognized and each of the acoustic feature patterns generated by said generating means by referring to said information.

A word dictionary adapted for use on a speech recognition apparatus which recognizes an input word by collating an acoustic feature pattern of the input word with acoustic feature patterns of words stored in the word dictionary, said word dictionary comprising:

• a recording medium;
• subword sequences of words stored in said recording medium;
• and
• information indicating an importance of each subword in each subword sequence stored in said recording medium together with said subword sequences,
• said importance indicating whether each subword of each word is an important factor for word recognition with the speech recognition apparatus, and
• said importance including at least an accent of each subword.