Query expansion and weighting based on results of automatic speech recognition

A method of identifying one or more items from amongst a plurality of items in response to a spoken utterance, the method comprising:

• using an automatic speech recognizer to recognize the utterance, including generating a plurality of hypotheses for the utterance, wherein each of the hypotheses includes one or more words;
• generating a query element for use in identifying one or more items from amongst the plurality of items, wherein the query element includes a set of values representing all of the plurality of hypotheses, each value corresponding to one of said words;
• and
• weighting each of the values in the query element based on a confidence measure of the hypothesis that includes the word corresponding to said value, wherein the confidence measure of each hypothesis is based on a rank of the hypothesis among the plurality of hypotheses.

An information retrieval system comprising:

• a database;
• an information retrieval engine to identify and retrieve one or more items from the database which satisfy a text-based query;
• and
• an automatic speech recognizer to generate the query in response to an utterance of a user, the automatic speech recognizer configured to:
• generate a plurality of hypotheses for the utterance;
• and
• generate a query element representing the query, the query element including values representing two or more hypotheses of the plurality of hypotheses.

A call routing system comprising:

• a database;
• a call routing engine to identify and provide a caller with access to a call destination which satisfies a text-based query;
• and
• an automatic speech recognizer to generate the query in response to an utterance of the caller, the automatic speech recognizer configured to:
• generate a plurality of hypotheses for the utterance;
• and
• generate a query element representing the query, the query element including values representing two or more hypotheses of the plurality of hypotheses.