Lattice Indexing for Spoken Term Detection

This paper considers the problem of constructing an efficient inverted index for the spoken term detection (STD) task. More specifically, we construct a deterministic weighted finite-state transducer storing soft-hits in the form of (utterance ID, start time, end time, posterior score) quadruplets. We propose a generalized factor transducer structure which retains the time information necessary for performing STD. The required information is embedded into the path weights of the factor transducer without disrupting the inherent optimality. We also describe how to index all substrings seen in a collection of raw automatic speech recognition lattices using the proposed structure. Our STD indexing/search implementation is built upon the OpenFst Library and is designed to scale well to large problems. Experiments on Turkish and English data sets corroborate our claims.