However, since a) a single sound can potentially correspond to more than one word (i.e., homonyms) and b) searching the entire collection for phonetically identical/similar terms is prohibitive, we need an efficient disambiguation method.
in the case of Japanese, the homonym problem is multiply crucial because words consist of different character types, i.e., "kanji," "katakana," "hiragana," alphabets and other characters like numerals 1 .