6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising estimating times at which the substrings likely occur in the audio data, and weighting the comparison of the recognized language elements and the substrings based on a difference between the estimated times and the times associated with the recognized language elements from the audio data.
1. A method, comprising: receiving audio data and a textual transcript of the audio data to be aligned with the audio data; generating, from the textual transcript, a language model that represents a set of particular substrings of the textual transcript, the language model comprising allowed states of the language model and one or more transitions that link the allowed states; receiving, from a speech recognizer, recognized language elements from the received audio data and times at which the recognized language elements occur in the audio data; comparing the recognized language elements from the audio data to substrings represented by the language model to identify times at which particular ones of the substrings occur in the audio data; aligning a portion of the textual transcript with a portion of the audio data using the identified times; and outputting the aligned portion of the textual transcript.