A method for speech recognition is described that uses an initial recognizer to perform an initial speech recognition pass on an input speech utterance to determine an initial recognition result corresponding to the input speech utterance, and a reliability measure reflecting a per word reliability of the initial recognition result. For portions of the initial recognition result where the reliability of the result is low, a re-evaluation recognizer is used to perform a re-evaluation recognition pass on the corresponding portions of the input speech utterance to determine a re-evaluation recognition result corresponding to the re-evaluated portions of the input speech utterance. The initial recognizer and the re-evaluation recognizer are complementary so as to make different recognition errors. A final recognition result is determined based on the re-evaluation recognition result if any, and otherwise based on the initial recognition result.