  The multidimensional, heterogeneous, and temporal nature of speech databases
raises interesting challenges for representation and query. Recently,
annotation graphs have been proposed as a general-purpose representational
framework for speech databases. Typical queries on annotation graphs require
path expressions similar to those used in semistructured query languages.
However, the underlying model is rather different from the customary graph
models for semistructured data: the graph is acyclic and unrooted, and both
temporal and inclusion relationships are important. We develop a query language
and describe optimization techniques for an underlying relational
representation.
