Universal Phone Recognition for Language Agnostic Keyword Search

Anonymous

Abstract: Recently, significant advanced have been made in universal phone recognition. Certain of these methods allow researchers to recognize phones in thousands of languages. In this paper, we explore the usage of such universal phone recognition for phonetic keyword search (KWS). That is, we apply these methods to search for specific sequences of phones, corresponding to keywords, in a set of audio files. We find that truly universal phone recognition might not be viable for KWS, but phone recognition systems can be fine-tuned with small amounts of data (3-5 hours of recordings) to produce useful results.