13. The device according to claim 12 , the irrelevant information removal component comprising a feature transformation component for applying a vector mapping function to the sequence of feature vectors to remove the portion of the acoustic information not relevant to recognizing a unit of speech from the sequence.
13. The device according to claim 12 , the irrelevant information removal component comprising a feature transformation component for applying a vector mapping function to the sequence of feature vectors to remove the portion of the acoustic information not relevant to recognizing a unit of speech from the sequence. 15. The device according to claim 13 , further comprising a speech decoding component to recognize the unit of speech from the feature vectors following the removal of the portion of the acoustic information.