This paper investigates the estimation of word posterior probabilities based on word lattices and presents applications of these posteriors in a large vocabulary speech recognition system. A novel approach to integrating these word posterior probability distributions into a conventional Viterbi decoder is presented. The problem of the robust estimation of confidence scores from word posteriors is examined and a method based on decision trees is suggested. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated on the broadcast news and the conversational telephone speech corpora where improvements both in terms of word error rate and normalised cross entropy were achieved compared to the baseline HTK evaluation systems.