Position-dependent phonetic models for reliable pronunciation identification

A method comprising:

• receiving a representation of a speech signal;
• a processor decoding the representation of the speech signal into a sequence of words using a word language model and an acoustic model;
• a processor converting each word in the sequence of words into a sequence of position-dependent phonetic tokens using a phonetic token lexicon, which provides a position-dependent phonetic token description of each word in a lexicon, wherein each position-dependent phonetic token comprises a phone and a position indicator that indicates the position of the phone within a syllable;
• and
• a processor determining probabilities for sub-sequences in the sequences of position-dependent phonetic tokens by applying sub-sequences of position-dependent phonetic tokens converted from the sequence of words to a position-dependent phonetic language model that describes probabilities of sequences of position-dependent phonetic tokens comprising a conditional probability of a position-dependent phonetic token given at least two preceding position-dependent phonetic tokens and probabilities of individual position-dependent phonetic tokens.