A two pass classifier for utterance rejection in keyword spotting

A classifier for utterance rejection in a hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech recognizer is presented. This classifier, termed the two-pass classifier, is a postprocessor to the HMM recognizer, and consists of a two-stage discriminant analysis. The first stage employs the generalized probabilistic descent (GPD) discriminative training framework, while the second stage performs linear discrimination combining the output of the first stage with HMM likelihood scores. In this fashion the classification power of the HMM is combined with that of the GPD stage which is specifically designed for keyword/nonkeyword classification. Experimental results show that, on two separate databases, the two-pass classifier significantly outperforms a single-pass classifier based solely on the HMM likelihood scores.<<ETX>>