Low Resource Keyword Search With Synthesized Crosslingual Exemplars

The transfer of acoustic data across languages has been shown to improve keyword search (KWS) performance in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose a way of performing this transfer that reduces the impact of the prevalence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms on KWS in such a setting. We investigate a novel usage of multilingual features for KWS with very little training data in the target languages. The crux of our approach is the use of synthetic phone exemplars to convert the search into a query-by-example task, which we solve with the dynamic time warping algorithm. Using bottleneck features obtained from a network trained multilingually on a set of (source) languages, we train an extended distance metric learner (EDML) for four target languages from the IARPA Babel program (which are distinct from the source languages). Compared with a baseline system that is based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a multilingual acoustic model, we observe an average term weighted value improvement of 0.0603 absolute (74% relative) in a setting with only 1 h of training data in the target language. When the data scarcity is relaxed to 10 h, we find that phone posteriors obtained by fine-tuning the multilingual network give better EDML systems. In this relaxed setting, the EDML systems still perform better than the baseline on OOV terms. Given their complementary natures, combining the EDML and the ASR-based baseline results in even further performance improvements in all settings.