70. Apparatus as in claim 69 further comprising: (c) means for determining, for a given string of labels, the likelihood of a particular word which includes means for combining the votes of all labels in the string for the particular word together with the penalties of all labels not in the string for the particular word.
69. A speech recognition apparatus for selecting likely words from a vocabulary of words wherein each word is represented by a sequence of at least one probabilistic finite state phone machine and wherein an acoustic processor generates acoustic labels in response to a spoken input, the apparatus comprising: (a) means for forming a first table in which each label in the alphabet provides a vote for each word in the vocabulary, each label vote for a subject word indicating the likelihood of the subject word producing the label providing the vote; and (b) means for forming a second table in which each label is assigned a penalty for each word in the vocabulary, the penalty assigned to a given label for a given word being indicative of the likelihood of the given label not being produced according to the model for the given word.