A technique for identifying one or more items from amongst a plurality of
items in response to a spoken utterance is used to improve call routing
and information retrieval systems which employ automatic speech
recognition (ASR). An automatic speech recognizer is used to recognize the
utterance, including generating a plurality of hypotheses for the
utterance. A query element is then generated for use in identifying one or
more items from amongst the plurality of items. The query element includes
a set of values representing two or more of the hypotheses, each value
corresponding to one of the words in the hypotheses. Each value in the
query element is then weighted based on hypothesis confidence, word
confidence, or both, as determined by the ASR process. The query element
is then applied to the plurality of items to identify one or more items
which satisfy the query.
