In this study, we examine how fast decoding of conversational speech with large vocabularies profits from efficient use of linguistic information, i.e. language models and grammars. Based on a re-entrant single pronunciation prefix tree, we use the concept of linguistic context polymorphism to achieve an early incorporation of language model information. This approach allows us to use all available language model information in a one-pass decoder, using the same engine to decode with

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... n-gram language models as well as context free grammars or re-scoring of lattices in an efficient way. We compare this approach to our previous decoder, which needed three passes to incorporate all available information. The results on a very large vocabulary task show that the search can be speeded up by almost a factor of three, without introducing additional search errors. On all examined tasks, we observed significant improvements by using an exact language model lookahead over usual bigram lookahead strategies, even for very hard tasks with unmatched conditions, without introducing extra memory overhead.