Very-large-vocabulary Mandarin voice message file retrieval using speech queries

In order to solve the problem with the new environment of fast growth of audio resources on the Internet, the paper presents an approach which is capable of retrieving Mandarin voice message files using queries of unconstrained speech. By properly utilizing the monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, the proposed approach performs the statistical similarity estimation between the speech queries and the voice message files, and executes the complete matching process directly at the phonetic level using syllable based statistical information. Based on this approach, some experiments are tested and encouraging results are demonstrated.