Patent ID: 8626508

Claim:
A speech search device for receiving input speech and searching for speech data obtained by sampling the input speech, the speech search device comprising: a database-use speech recognizer that recognizes the speech data, which is recorded in a speech database to obtain a word string; a speech-use phoneme string generator unit that generates a phoneme string from the word string obtained by the database-use speech recognizer; a suffix array generator that generates a suffix array from the phoneme string generated by the speech-use phoneme string generator; an input device that inputs a search keyword; an input phoneme generator that generates a keyword phoneme string from the search keyword input by the input device; a speech searcher that sets a first threshold to be used in a search of the suffix array, that searches the suffix array for the keyword phoneme string, using dynamic programming, based on the first threshold, wherein the speech searcher iteratively adjusts the first threshold, performs the search based on the adjusted first threshold, and presents a result of the search during each iteration, wherein the adjusted first threshold is determined based on: t ′ = p p - 1 ⁢ t , in which p is a number of divisions with respect to the search keyword, t is the first threshold, and t′ is the adjusted first threshold; and an output device that outputs the result of the search by the speech searcher, during each iteration.