1. A method comprising: identifying an index of words and a phone lattice; removing insignificant units from the phone lattice, to yield a revised phone lattice; normalizing costs in the revised phone lattice such that a cost of a best path is set to zero; generating a cost-normalized query using factors of interest, wherein the index of words is indexed by the factors of interest; and generating a shortlist of recognized speech possibilities using the revised phone lattice, the index of words, and indices contained in the cost-normalized query.