1. A speech processing method, comprising: at an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine: converting a word lattice that describes multiple hypotheses of a received input utterance into a modified word lattice wherein transitions without any input in the word lattice are represented as epsilon transitions in the modified word lattice; and at a spoken language understanding (SLU) engine: receiving the modified word lattice from the ASR engine; and performing an SLU determination via the SLU engine.