6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein said step of ranking the replacement strings in the first and/or second sets comprises ranking so as to account for assignment of a weighted bias scheme in which a weighted bias is assigned to some edit operations included in the count of the quantity of operations required to transform the particular different candidate phoneme sequence included in the limited number of different candidate phoneme sequences into the source phoneme sequence.
6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein said step of ranking the replacement strings in the first and/or second sets comprises ranking so as to account for assignment of a weighted bias scheme in which a weighted bias is assigned to some edit operations included in the count of the quantity of operations required to transform the particular different candidate phoneme sequence included in the limited number of different candidate phoneme sequences into the source phoneme sequence. 7. The method of claim 6 , wherein said weighted bias scheme is based on types of edit operations, wherein statistically frequently performed edits are given a higher weighted bias than statistically infrequently performed edits.