Method and apparatus for phonetic context adaptation for improved speech recognition

The present invention provides a computerized method and apparatus for automatically generating from a first speech recognizer a second speech recognizer which can be adapted to a specific domain. The first speech recognizer can include a first acoustic model with a first decision network and corresponding first phonetic contexts. The first acoustic model can be used as a starting point for the adaptation process. A second acoustic model with a second decision network and corresponding second phonetic contexts for the second speech recognizer can be generated by re-estimating the first decision network and the corresponding first phonetic contexts based on domain-specific training data.