12. The method of claim 1 , wherein any amount of query dilation is configurable for different instances of searching and/or for different qualities of speech recognizer.
1. A method for contextual voice query dilation in a Spoken Web search, the method comprising: determining a context in which a voice query is created; generating a set of multiple voice query terms based on the context and information derived by a speech recognizer component pertaining to the voice query; processing the set of query terms with a set of multiple dilation operators to produce a dilated set of queries associated with each of the multiple dilation operators; searching the dilated set of queries for each of the associated dilation operators against a database to identify one or more documents from the database that are relevant to each query in the dilated set of queries; and generating a ranked list comprising each of the one or more documents identified in the database, wherein said ranked list is generated based on (i) a first set of one or more weights assigned to the set of multiple dilation operators in said processing of the query terms and (ii) a second set of one or more weights assigned to the each of the multiple dilation operators corresponding to each document, wherein the first set of one or more weights is based on speech-to-text quality and the second set of one or more weights is based on context; wherein at least one of the steps is carried out by a computer device.