A language model comprising a plurality of augmented-word n-grams and probabilities corresponding to such n-grams. Each n-gram is comprised of a sequence of augmented words. Each augmented word is comprised of the orthographic representation of the word together with a tag representing lexical information regarding the word, such as syntactic or semantic information. Also disclosed are a method of building such a language model, a method of automatically recognizing speech using the language model and a speech recognition system that employs the language model.