eess.ASJun 9, 2026

Massive Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

Authors: Leonor BarreirosRaul MonteiroAfonso MendesGonçalo M. Correia

Organizations: Priberam Labs, Lisboa, Portugal · Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal · Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition systems have been shown to under-perform when it comes to transcribing words rarely seen in the training data, namely specialized terminology. Open-vocabulary keyword spotting, combined with contextual biasing, has been shown to mitigate this issue. However, existing systems can only handle glossaries of a few hundred terms without becoming an infeasible bottleneck. We propose a system that stores features with a memory footprint up to 128 times smaller than a comparable baseline and allows users to process massive databases while remaining open-vocabulary. Without fine-tuning the speech recognition model, our system achieves a comparable entity recall as uncompressed solutions, even in languages not seen during training.

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