4. The method of claim 3 wherein determining the score for the putative instance according to the determined degree of acoustic similarity includes combining the match score for the query and match scores for one or more of the language patterns.
4. The method of claim 3 wherein determining the score for the putative instance according to the determined degree of acoustic similarity includes combining the match score for the query and match scores for one or more of the language patterns. 5. The method of claim 4 wherein processing the query using the language data to identify one or more language patterns that each include the first portion of the pattern that is acoustically similar to the query includes accepting a specification of at least some of said patterns with a specification of the query.