Abstract: Apparatus for correcting speech including one or more words of a predetermined language comprises candidate word correlating means for correlating each of one or more speech data items of words to one or more candidate words obtained by recognizing said speech data items indicating the words. Analogous word correlating means correlates each of the candidate words correlated to the speech data items to null or more analogous words which may correspond to a pronunciation of each of the candidate words. The speech correcting apparatus further comprises pronunciation correcting data output means for outputting pronunciation correcting data corresponding to the analogous word indicated by the speech data item and correcting the pronunciation of the word indicated by the speech data item when the word indicated by the speech data item matches the analogous word correlated to each of the candidate words which are correlated to the speech data item.

Abstract: A speech recognition apparatus and the method thereof for correctly recognizing an English word from a non-native English pronunciation, for example. A vector data generating part and a label generating part processes speech data of a sentence of English speech pronounced by a Japanese speaker to convert it to a label string. A candidate word generating part correlates the label string of the sentence to a first candidate word comprising one or more English words. An analogous word adding part uses a word database to search an English word analogous the pronunciation of the first candidate word, such as a analogous word “lead” for a first candidate word “read”, for example, (it is difficult for a Japanese speaker to discriminate between “l” and “r” in pronunciation), and adds the obtained analogous word to the first candidate word to make it be a second candidate word.