Effects of word recognition errors in spoken query processing

The effects of word recognition errors (WRE) in spoken document retrieval have been well studied and well reported in recent information retrieval (IR) literature. Much less experimental work has been devoted to studying the effects of WRE in spoken query processing in IR. It is easy to hypothesize that given the typical length of the user query, the effects of WRE in spoken queries on the performance of IR systems must be destructive. The experimental work reported tests this. The paper reports on the background of the study, on the construction of a suitable test collection, on the first experimental results obtained and on the limitations of the study. The results show that classical IR techniques are quite robust to considerably high levels of WRE rates in spoken queries (roughly below 40%), in particular for long queries.