Spoken Term Detection Using Phoneme Transition Network from Multiple Speech Recognizers' Outputs

Abstract

Spoken Term Detection (STD) that considers the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem has generated significant interest in the field of spoken document processing. This study describes STD with false detection control using phoneme transition networks (PTNs) derived from the outputs of multiple speech recognizers. PTNs are similar to subword-based confusion networks (CNs), which are originally derived from a single speech recognizer. Since PTN-formed index is based on the outputs of multiple speech recognizers, it is robust to recognition errors. Therefore, PTN should also be robust to recognition errors in an STD task, when compared to the CN-formed index from a single speech recognition system. Our PTN-formed index was evaluated on a test collection. The experiment showed that the PTN-based approach effectively detected OOV terms, and improved the F-measure value from 0.370 to 0.639 when compared with a baseline approach. Furthermore, we applied two false detection control parameters, one is based on the majority voting scheme. The other is a measure of the ambiguity of CN, to the calculation of detection score. By introducing these parameters, the performance of STD was found to be better (0.736 for the F-measure value) than that without any parameters (0.639).