Query-By-Example Keyword Spotting System Using Multi-Head Attention and Soft-triple Loss

Jinmiao Huang, Waseem Gharbieh, Han Suk Shim, Eugene Kim

Abstract: This paper proposes a neural network architecture for tackling the query-by-example user-defined keyword spotting task. A multi-head attention module is added on top of a multi-layered GRU for effective feature extraction, and a normalized multi-head attention module is proposed for feature aggregation. We also adopt the softtriple loss - a combination of triplet loss and softmax loss - and showcase its effectiveness. We demonstrate the performance of our model on internal datasets with different languages and the public Hey-Snips dataset. We compare the performance of our model to a baseline system [1] and conduct an ablation study to show the benefit of each component in our architecture. The proposed work shows solid performance while preserving simplicity.