Evaluation Metrics

The metrics described in this section come from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48187287.pdf.

Spoken term discovery can be logically broken down into a series of 3 operations, which can be all evaluated independently (see Figure 1). The first step consists in matching pairs of stretches of speech on the basis of their global similarity. The second step consists in clustering the matching pairs, thereby building a library of classes with potentially many instances. This is equivalent to building a lexicon. In the third step, the system can use its acquired classes to parse the continuous stream into candidate tokens and boundaries. Some systems may only implement some of these steps, others may do them simultaneously rather than sequentially. The metric below have been devised to enable comparisons between these different systems by evaluating separately these logically distinct steps.

../_images/term_discovery.png

Figure 1. term discovery principles

All of our metric assume a time aligned transcription, where \(T_{i,j}\) is the (phoneme) transcription corresponding to the speech fragment designed by the pair of indices \(\langle i,j \rangle\) (i.e., the speech fragment between frame i and j). If the left or right edge of the fragment contains part of a phoneme, that phoneme is included in the transcription if is corresponds to more than more than 30ms or more than 50% of it’s duration.