Effective keyword search for low-resourced conversational speech
Résumé
In this paper we aim to enhance keyword search for conversational telephone speech under
low-resourced conditions. Two techniques to improve the detection of out-of-vocabulary
keywords are assessed in this study: using extra text resources to augment the lexicon and
language model, and via subword units for keyword search. Two approaches for data
augmentation are explored to extend the limited amount of transcribed conversational
speech: using conversational-like Web data and texts generated by recurrent neural
networks. Contrastive comparisons of subword-based systems are performed to evaluate
the benefits of multiple subword decodings and single decoding. Keyword search results are
reported for all the techniques, but only some improve performance. Results are reported for
the Mongolian and Igbo languages using data from the 2016 Babel program.