For large vocabulary speech recognition using HMMs, context-dependent subword units have been often employed. However, when context-dependent phone models are used, they result in a system which has too may parameters to train. The problem of too many parameters and too little training data is absolutely crucial in the design of a statistical speech recognizer. Furthermore, when building large vocabulary speech recognition systems, unseen triphone problem is unavoidable. In this paper, we propose the modified phonetic decision tree algorithm for the automatic prediction of unseen triphones which has advantages solving these problems through following two experiments in Japanese contexts. The baseline experimental results show that the modified tree based clustering algorithm is effective for clustering and reducing the number of states without any degradation in performance. The task experimental results show that our proposed algorithm also has the advantage of providing a automatic prediction of unseen triphones.