Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Echolocation: Using Word-Burst Analysis To Rescore Keyword Search Candidates In Low-Resource Languages, Justin Richards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State of the art technologies for speech recognition are very accurate for heavily studied languages like English. They perform poorly, though, for languages wherein the recorded archives of speech data available to researchers are relatively scant. In the context of these low-resource languages, the task of keyword search within recorded speech is formidable. We demonstrate a method that generates more accurate keyword search results on low-resource languages by studying a pattern not exploited by the speech recognizer. The word-burst, or burstiness, pattern is the tendency for word utterances to appear together in bursts as conversational topics fluctuate. We give evidence …