Automatic keyword selection for keyword search development and tuning

In this paper, we investigate the problem of automatically selecting textual keywords for keyword search development and tuning on audio data for any language. Briefly, the method samples candidate keywords in the training data while trying to match a set of target marginal distributions for keyword features such as keyword frequency in the training or development audio, keyword length, frequency of out-of-vocabulary words, and TF-IDF scores. The method is evaluated on four IARPA Babel program base period languages. We show the use of the automatically selected keywords for the keyword search system development and tuning. We show also that search performance is improved by tuning the decision threshold on the automatically selected keywords.