Confidence measures for keyword spotting using support vector machines

Support Vector machines (SVM) is a new and very promising classification technique developed from the theory of Structural Risk Minimisation [1]. In this paper, we propose an alternative out-of-vocabulary word detection method relying on confidence measures and support vector machines. Confidence measures are computed from phone level information provided by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based speech recognizer. We use three kinds of average techniques as arithmetic, geometric and harmonic averages to compute a confidence measure for each word. The acceptance/rejection decision of a word is based on the confidence feature vector which is processed by a SVM classifier. The performance of the proposed SVM classifier is compared with methods based on the averaging of confidence measures.