Phonetic set indexing for fast lexical access

A novel nonsequential indexing mechanism (termed phonetic set indexing) has been evaluated for the purpose of fast word pre-selection. Our approach to handling the lexical access problem stems from the primary observation that the set of phones which are present in the transcription of a word is sparsely distributed across the vocabulary, and is thus suitable as an indexing key for retrieving a short-list of word possibilities.