The 2016 BBN Georgian telephone speech keyword spotting system

In this paper we describe the 2016 BBN conversational telephone speech keyword spotting system; the culmination of four years of research and development under the IARPA Babel program. The system was constructed in response to the NIST Open Keyword Search (OpenKWS) evaluation of 2016. We present our technological breakthroughs in building top-performing keyword spotting processing systems for new languages, in the face of limited transcribed speech, noisy conditions, and limited system build time of one week.