Patent ID: 8150678

Claim:
A spoken document retrieval system, comprising: a means for storing a correspondence table between subwords and spoken documents indicative of the relationship between a subword extracted from a spoken document and the position of the subword in the spoken document; a means for converting an entered keyword into a sequence of subwords to generate the sequence of subwords from the keyword; a means for obtaining a position where the first subword in the sequence of subwords generated from the keyword is positioned in the spoken document, from the correspondence table between subwords and spoken documents; a candidate period generating means for generating a candidate period starting at the obtained position of the subword and having a length of time determined by the length of the sequence of subwords generated from the keyword; a candidate period selecting means for selecting a candidate period to be outputted as a retrieved result, based on similarity between the keyword and any one of the spoken document and the subword in the candidate period; and a means for outputting the selected candidate period as the retrieved result.