Stochastic pronunciation modelling for spoken term detection
Dong Wang, Simon King, Joe Frankel · 2009
A major challenge faced by a spoken term detection (STD) system is the detection of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms. Although a subword-based STD system is able to detect OOV terms, performance reduction is always observed compared to in-vocabulary terms. Current approaches to STD do not acknowledge the particular properties of OOV terms, such as pronunciation uncertainty. In this paper, we use a stochastic pronunciation model to deal with the uncertain pronunciations of OOV terms. By considering all possible term pronunciations, predicted by a joint-multigram model, we observe a significant performance improvement. Index Terms: joint-multigram, pronunciation model, spoken term detection, speech recognition