Pruning subsequence search with attention-based embedding

Searching a large database to find a sequence that is most similar to a query can be prohibitively expensive, particularly if individual sequence comparisons involve complex operations such as warping. To achieve scalability, "pruning" heuristics are typically employed to minimize the portion of the database that must be searched with more complex matching. We present an approximate pruning technique which involves embedding sequences in a Euclidean space. Sequences are embedded using a convolutional network with a form of attention that integrates over time, trained on matching and non-matching pairs of sequences. By using fixed-length embeddings, our pruning method effectively runs in constant time, making it many orders of magnitude faster than full dynamic time warping-based matching for large datasets. We demonstrate our approach on a large-scale musical score-to-audio recording retrieval task.