Patent ID: 8386264

Claim:
A speech data retrieval apparatus comprising: a speech database including plural pieces of speech data therein; a speech recognition unit configured to read speech data from the speech database, carry out a speech recognition process with respect to the read speech data, and output a result of speech recognition process as a lattice in which a phoneme, a syllable, or a word is a base unit; a confusion network creation unit configured to create a confusion network based on the lattice from the speech recognition unit and output the result of speech recognition process as the confusion network; an inverted index table creation unit configured to create an inverted index table based on the confusion network from the confusion network creation unit; a query input unit configured to receive a query input by a user, carry out a speech recognition process with respect to the received query, and output a result of speech recognition process as a character string; a query conversion unit configured to convert the character string from the query input unit into a label string in which a phoneme, a syllable, or a word is a base unit; and a label string check unit configured to check the label string from the query conversion unit against the inverted index table from the inverted index table creation unit, retrieve speech data which is included in both of the label string and the speech database, and output a list of pointer which indicates an address in the speech database in which the retrieved speech data is stored.