Mobile Information Access with Spoken Query Answering

This paper addresses the problem of information and service accessibility in mobile devices with limited resources. A solution is developed and tested through a prototype that applies state-of-the-art Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) and knowledge-based Information Retrieval (IR) processing for spoken query answering. For the DSR part, a configurable DSR system is implemented on the basis of the ETSI-DSR advanced front-end and the SPHINX IV recognizer. For the knowledge-based IR part, a distributed system solution is developed for fast retrieval of the most relevant documents, with a text window focused over the part which most likely contains an answer to the query. The two systems are integrated into a full spoken query answering system. The prototype can answer queries and questions within the chosen football (soccer) test domain, but the system has the flexibility for being ported to other domains.