A novel word pre-selection method based on phonetic set indexing

The possibility of pre-fetching words using the phoneme sequence output of automatic speech recognition systems has been explored. A novel non-sequential 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 primacy observation that the set of phonemes which are present in a 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. The fixed dimensionality of the phonetic set representation also makes it suitable for implementation with compact bit strings, thus enabling fast lexical access using low-level bit operations.