An intelligent query system for processing voiced-based queries is disclosed. This distributed client-server system, typically implemented on an intranet or over the Internet accepts a user's queries at his/her computer, PDA or workstation using a speech input interface. After converting the user's query from speech to text, a natural language engine, a database processor and a full-text SQL database is implemented to find a single answer that best matches the user's query. Both statistical and semantic decoding are used to assist and improve the performance of the query recognition.