When is phonetic search with FPGAs efficient?

Phonetic search represents a new area in information retrieval. Its goal is to search texts for all words that have the same pronunciation as the word heard and written by the user. The user is assumed to be a foreigner who uses in general a different alphabet and different transcription rules. With rapid advances in programmable hardware (FPGA), a natural idea would be to use FPGA-implementations for phonetic search. This paper provides an original methodology to assess their benefits based on the given hardware, search string, language, availability of a dictionary and length of the searched text.