Patent ID: 8315851

Claim:
An article of manufacture including a non-transitory computer readable storage medium to tangibly store instructions, which when executed by a computer, cause the computer to: receive at least one Kana character from a user; apply a Kana rule set to the at least one Kana character; define the at least one Kana character in an alphabetic language based on a sound of the at least one Kana character; generate a full phonetic key for the defined at least one Kana character; generate a replaced-vowel phonetic key by replacing a vowel in the full phonetic key; generate a no-vowel phonetic key by removing the vowel in the full phonetic key; process Kana records in a database to determine a relevant Kana record that has a phonetic key identical to at least one of the full phonetic key, the replaced-vowel phonetic key, and the no-vowel phonetic key; and present the relevant Kana record to the user.