Spoken versus written queries for mobile information access: An experiment on Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

As Chinese is not alphabetic and the input of Chinese characters into computer is still a difficult and unsolved problem, voice retrieval of information becomes apparently an important application area of mobile information retrieval (IR). It is intuitive to think that users would speak more words and require less time when issuing queries vocally to an IR system than forming queries in writing. This paper presents some new findings derived from an experimental study on Mandarin Chinese to test this hypothesis and assesses the feasibility of spoken queries for search purposes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.