Simulating early-termination search for verbose spoken queries

Building search engines that can respond to spoken queries with spoken content requires that the system not just be able to find useful responses, but also that it know when it has heard enough about what the user wants to be able to do so. This paper describes a simulation study with queries spoken by non-native speakers that suggests that indicates that finding relevant content is often possible within a half minute, and that combining features based on automatically recognized words with features designed for automated prediction of query difficulty can serve as a useful basis for predicting when that useful content has been found.