The present invention is directed to a computer implemented method and
apparatus for flexibly recognizing meaningful data items within an
arbitrary user utterance. According to one example embodiment of the
invention, a set of one or more key phrases and a set of one or more
filler phrases are defined, probabilities are assigned to the key phrases
and/or the filler phrases, and the user utterances is evaluated against
the set of key phrases and the set of filler phrases using the
probabilities.