2. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of obtaining the phonemic transformation weights includes the substep of determining the phonemic transformation weight based on phonological features of phonemes used for edit operations.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein the substep of determining the phonemic weight comprises using the following equation: ##EQU5## where N represents the number of phonological feature types for each phoneme, .alpha..sub.i is the relative significance of feature type i, functions f.sub.i (/x/) and f.sub.i (/y/) represent feature value of the feature type i of phoneme /x/ and /y/, and t(f(/x/), f(/y/)) represents a transformation cost between feature values f(/x/) and f(/y/).