The invention aims to make an automatic information system suitable for the input of requests which are spoken as naturally as possible and which are not subject to restrictions about which the user must be informed in advance. To this end, the system and the method are subdivided into several, essentially independently operating segments with unambiguous interfaces. A first segment serves for the recognition of words and outputs a word graph. A second segment forms a concept graph from the word graph in that essentially the word graph is searched only for word sequences wherefrom values for a database enquiry can be derived; such word sequences, or also single words, are replaced by concepts in the concept graph. In a further segment the concepts in the concept graph are bridged and gaps between the concepts are filled. A speech model is taken into account for this operation. A stochastic attributed grammar is used to determine the concepts from the word graph and to determine the meaning of the word sequences in the concepts. Because irrelevant filler words in the spoken request are ignored early on, the computational expenditure is comparatively small despite the freely pronounced requests.