15. The apparatus of claim 14 wherein the method further comprises: (0) sorting the entries of the ARPA table in descending n-gram order to generate a sorted ARPA table; wherein each of operation (1) and operation (2) is performed on the sorted ARPA table from top-to-bottom.
14. An apparatus comprising: a computer programmed to perform a method operating on an ARPA table for a modeled natural language in which each entry of the ARPA table includes an n-gram Az, an associated backoff value Az.p equal to the conditional probability p(z|A) that symbol z follows context A in the modeled natural language, and an associated backoff weight value Az.b for the context A, the method comprising: (1) computing and adding by said computer for each entry of the ARPA table in descending n-gram order an associated maximum backoff weight product value Az.m; (2) after performing operation (1), computing and adding by said computer for each entry of the ARPA table in descending n-gram order an associated max-backoff value Az.w=max h p(z|hA) which is the maximum backoff value for any head h preceding the context A of the n-gram Az; and (3) extending by said computer the ARPA table by adding a column storing the associated maximum backoff weight product values Az.m and a column storing the associated max-backoff values Az.w.