Matching Latent Encoding for Audio-Text based Keyword Spotting

Using audio and text embeddings jointly for Keyword Spotting (KWS) has shown high-quality results, but the key challenge of how to semantically align two embeddings for multi-word keywords of different sequence lengths remains largely unsolved. In this paper, we propose an audio-text-based end-to-end model architecture for flexible keyword spotting (KWS), which builds upon learned audio and text embeddings. Our architecture uses a novel dynamic programming-based algorithm, Dynamic Sequence Partitioning (DSP), to optimally partition the audio sequence into the same length as the word-based text sequence using the monotonic alignment of spoken content. Our proposed model consists of an encoder block to get audio and text embeddings, a projector block to project individual embeddings to a common latent space, and an audio-text aligner containing a novel DSP algorithm, which aligns the audio and text embeddings to determine if the spoken content is the same as the text. Experimental results show that our DSP is more effective than other partitioning schemes, and the proposed architecture outperformed the state-of-the-art results on the public dataset in terms of Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) and Equal-Error-Rate (EER) by 14.4 % and 28.9%, respectively.