Speech-driven query retrieval for question-answering

Mobile devices are being used as aids to access a variety of information resources by browsing the Web. However, given their limited screen real estate and soft keyboards, general Web browsing to access information is a tedious task. A system that (a) allows a user to specify their information need as a spoken language query and (b) returns the answer to user´s information need directly would be particularly appealing for these devices. In this paper, we address these two problems and present techniques that model question-answering as a query retrieval task. We show that we improve the retrieval accuracy by tightly integrating the constraints of the speech recognition and search components.