A system and method for phonetic searching of data

摘要

A method for phonetically searching media including a plurality of audio tracks is disclosed where each audio track is indexed to provide a phonetic representation of the audio track. The method comprises obtaining a text search query and searching for the text query against a set of reference documents to obtain a sub-set of pseudo-relevant documents. The pseudo-relevant documents are examined for a set of search expressions characterizing the pseudo-relevant documents. A phonetic representation corresponding to at least some of the set of search expressions is provided and for each of the phonetic representations of the search expressions, the indexed phonetic representations for one or more of the plurality of audio tracks is phonetically searched to provide any indicators of the incidence of the search expression within the one or more audio tracks. The resulting indicators from said phonetic searching are combined into a set of combined results for each of the set of search expressions; and the combined results returned.