The IBM keyword search system for the DARPA RATS program

The paper describes a state-of-the-art keyword search (KWS) system in which significant improvements are obtained by using Convolutional Neural Network acoustic models, a two-step speech segmentation approach and a simplified ASR architecture optimized for KWS. The system described in this paper had the best performance in the 2013 DARPA RATS evaluation for both Levantine and Farsi.