HarkMan──A Vocabulary-Independent Keyword Spotter for Spontaneous Chinese Speech

in this paper a novel technique adopted in HarkMan is introduced. HarkMan is a keyword-spotter designed to automatically spot the given words of a vocabulary-independent task in unconstrained Chinese telephone speech. The speak- ing manner and the number of keywords are not limited. This paper focuses on the novel technique which addresses acoustic modeling, keyword spotting network, search strategies, robustness, and rejection. The underlying technologies used in HarkMan given in this paper are useful not only for keyword spotting but also for continuous speech recognition. The system has achieved a figure-of-merit value over 90%.