Improved dynamic match phone lattice search for Persian spoken term detection system in online and offline applications

Abstract

Spoken term detection (STD) refers to discovering all occurrences of a given term in a set of speech utterances. One of the well-known approaches for the STD system is the phone lattice search (PLS) that produces a phone-based lattice of speech utterances. Since the accuracy of a phone recognizer affects the accuracy of the STD system, the PLS approach utilizes the minimum edit distance (MED) measure to compensate the phone recognizer errors. While this measure increases the detection rate, it also raises the false alarm rate. In this paper, we consider the PLS approach as the baseline. Then, we use Viterbi scoring and Jaro-Winkler similarity measure in order to decrease the false alarm rate. Since the proposed approach uses more techniques than the baseline approach, the search speed may decrease. To overcome this problem, we use lattice pruning and indexing techniques such as depth first search algorithm to increase the search speed in online and offline applications, respectively. We report the experimental results for monophone-based and triphone-based STD system. The results indicate that using triphone-based STD system improved the performance about 2% in comparison with monophone-based STD system. Moreover, when we used triphone-based models, the proposed approach including MED measure, Viterbi scores and Jaro-Winkler similarity measure improved the accuracy of the method with only MED measure, about 17%.