Improving the robustness to recognition errors in speech input question answering

In our previous work, we developed a prototype of a speech-input help system for home appliances such as digital cameras and microwave ovens. Given a factoid question, the system performs textual question answering using the manuals as the knowledge source. Whereas, given a HOW question, it retrieves and plays a demonstration video. However, our first prototype suffered from speech recognition errors, especially when the Japanese interrogative phrases in factoid questions were misrecognized. We therefore propose a method for solving this problem, which complements a speech query transcript with an interrogative phrase selected from a pre-determined list. The selection process first narrows down candidate phrases based on co-occurrences within the manual text, and then computes the similarity between each candidate and the query transcript in terms of pronunciation. Our method improves the Mean Reciprocal Rank of top three answers from 0.429 to 0.597 for factoid questions.