recognition process such indexing terms as syllable pairs separated by n syllables are also helpful in handling such syllable recognition errors in summary the monosyllables in chinese represent characters carrying some meanings and concepts and may somehow take care of the out of vocabulary problem the ambiguity caused by homonym characters sharing the same monosyllable may then be clarified by overlapping syllable segments with length n n gt 1 and syllable pairs separated by n syllables the former may capture the information of polysyllabic words or pleases which are important for retrieval and the latter may handle to some extent the problems arising from the flexible wording structure in the chinese language such as the abbreviation problem as well as those problems due to speech recognition errors including substitutions insertions and deletions with the above definition of indexing terms each utterance of the speech queries or records can be first recognized into a syllable lattice in this syllable lattice each utterance segment which may be a syllable can have several syllable candidates for a certain syllable candidate of the utterance segment the acoustic recognition score can be obtained during the speech recognition process the acoustic recognition score of a specific indexing term as mentioned above is then simply the average of the acoustic recognition scores for all syllables involved in the specific indexing term if either the query or the information records are in the form of text then the above recognition scores are replaced by frequency counts for the syllable level indexing terms and all others remain.