Research on Database Access by Speech

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Speech is one of the most natural and certain ways of human communication, and the recent progress of speech recognition technology is tremendous. Databases are the integrated information resources of various types of enterprises, and their values are increasing depending on the computerization of societies. However, in most cases, the database accesses are done by using the traditional keywords. This situation is deplorable since the society is now moving to mobile and ubiquitous one, where people are hard to use keyboard to obtain information. This research tried to resolve this problem by building a speech interface to a relational database system. We have implemented a system which consists of a Sun workstation, Oracle 7 a relational database management system, DS200 a speech recognition system, and FINE TALK a speech composition system. We have developed four software modules to combine such system components. The evaluation of the prototype was done, and it was revealed out that homonym problem should be resolved as well as how to accommodate incomplete Japanese sentence speeches. In this research, we have attached the first problem, and showed a solution by introducing the "instance keys, " which are the generalization of the traditional keys defined by using functional dependencies. It was shown that a more sophisticated speech interface can be realized by pursuing the proposed approach.