Patent ID: 7089188

Claim:
A method for electronic document or word searching, comprising the steps of: (a) given an input, expanding the input as a function of at least one of (i) acoustic similarity and/or (ii) frequency of word sequence occurrence, said expanding resulting in alternative input words or phrases, wherein the step of expanding includes: translating words in the given input to one or more phoneme strings; determining word boundaries in each of the phoneme strings to produce respective phoneme subsequences; and for each produced phoneme subsequence, generating at least one confusable word phrase having a pronunciation which is acoustically similar to the phoneme subsequence, said confusable word phrase forming an alternative input word or phrase, wherein the step of generating at least one confusable word phrase includes: comparing each phoneme subsequence to word pronunciations from a dictionary, said comparing resulting in a list of words from the dictionary; and ordering the list of words from the dictionary, the most likely word being at the top of the list, said ordering of the list including scoring the word pronunciation of each word in the dictionary against the phoneme subsequence using a distance metric based on the distance between a hypothesized pronunciation in the phoneme subsequence and the pronunciation from the dictionary; and (b) returning the alternative input words or phrases for further processing.