Speech-Activated Text Retrieval System for Cellular Phones with Web Browsing Capability

This paper describes a text retrieval system for cellular phones with Web browsing capability, which accepts spoken queries over the cellular phone and provides the search result on the cellular phone screen. This system recognizes spoken queries by large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR), retrieves relevant document by text retrieval, and provides the search result on the World Wide Web by the integration of the Web and the voice systems. The text retrieval in this system improves the performance for spoken short queries by: 1) utilizing word pairs with dependency relations, 2) distinguishing affirmative and negative expressions, and 3) converging synonyms. The LVCSR in this system shows enough performance level for speech over the cellular phone with acoustic and language models derived from a query corpus with target contents. The system constructed for user’s manual for a cellular phone navigates users to relevant passages for 81.4% of spoken queries.