A New SVM Kernel for Keyword Spotting Using Confidence Measures

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an alternative keyword spotting method relying on confidence measures and support vector machines. Confidence measures are computed from phone information provided by a Hidden Markov Model based speech recognizer. We use three kinds of techniques, i.e., arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means to compute a confidence measure for each word. The acceptance/rejection decision of a word is based on the confidence vector processed by the SVM classifier for which we propose a new Beta kernel. The performance of the proposed SVM classifier is compared with spotting methods based on some confidence means. Experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed SVM classifier method improves the performances of the keyword spotting system.