An indexing weight for voice-to-text search

The TF–IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) weight is a well-known indexing weight in information retrieval and text mining. However, it is not suitable for the increasingly popular voice-to-text search, as it does not take into account the impact of voice in the search process. We propose a method for calculating a new indexing weight, which is used as guidance for selection of suitable queries for voice-to-text search. In designing the new weight, we combine prominence factors from both the text and acoustic domains. Experimental results show significant improvement in the average search success rate with the new indexing weight.