Vocabulary independent discriminative utterance verification for non-keyword rejection in subword based speech recognition

摘要

A verification system to determine unknown input speech contains a recognized keyword or consists of speech or other sounds that do not contain any of the keywords. The verification system is designed to operate on the subword level, so that the verification process is advantageously vocabulary independent. Such a vocabulary-independent verifier is achieved by a two-stage verification process comprising subword level verification followed by string level verification. The subword level verification stage verifies each subword segment in the input speech as determined by an Hidden Markov Model recognizer to determine if that segment consists of the sound corresponding to the subword that the HMM recognizer assigned to that segment. The string level verification stage combines the results of the subword level verification to make the rejection decision for the whole keyword. Advantageously, the training of this two-stage verifier is independent of the specific vocabulary set implying that when the vocabulary set is update or changed the verifier need not be retrained and can still be reliably verifying the new set of keywords.