A comparison of query-by-example methods for spoken term detection
September 6, 2009
Conference Paper
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INTERSPEECH 2009, 6-10 September 2009.
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Summary
In this paper we examine an alternative interface for phonetic search, namely query-by-example, that avoids OOV issues associated with both standard word-based and phonetic search methods. We develop three methods that compare query lattices derived from example audio against a standard ngrambased phonetic index and we analyze factors affecting the performance of these systems. We show that the best systems under this paradigm are able to achieve 77% precision when retrieving utterances from conversational telephone speech and returning 10 results from a single query (performance that is better than a similar dictionary-based approach) suggesting significant utility for applications requiring high precision. We also show that these systems can be further improved using relevance feedback: By incorporating four additional queries the precision of the best system can be improved by 13.7% relative. Our systems perform well despite high phone recognition error rates (> 40%) and make use of no pronunciation or letter-to-sound resources.