A Posterior Probability-based System Hybridisation and Combination for Spoken Term Detection

Abstract

Spoken term detection (STD) is a fundamental task for multimedia information retrieval. To improve the detection performance, we have presented a direct posterior-based confidence measure generated from a neural network. In this paper, we propose a detection-independent confidence estimation based on the direct posterior confidence measure, in which the decision making is totally separated from the term detection. Based on this idea, we first present a hybrid system which conducts the term detection and confidence estimation based on different sub-word units, and then propose a combination method which merges detections from heterogeneous term detectors based on the direct posterior-based confidence. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed methods improved system performance considerably for both English and Spanish.