  This work proposes a novel approach to out-of-vocabulary (OOV) keyword search
(KWS) task. The proposed approach is based on using high-level features from an
automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, so called phoneme posterior based
(PPB) features, for decoding. These features are obtained by calculating
time-dependent phoneme posterior probabilities from word lattices, followed by
their smoothing. For the PPB features we developed a special novel very fast,
simple and efficient OOV decoder. Experimental results are presented on the
Georgian language from the IARPA Babel Program, which was the test language in
the OpenKWS 2016 evaluation campaign. The results show that in terms of maximum
term weighted value (MTWV) metric and computational speed, for single ASR
systems, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art
approach based on using in-vocabulary proxies for OOV keywords in the indexed
database. The comparison of the two OOV KWS approaches on the fusion results of
the nine different ASR systems demonstrates that the proposed OOV decoder
outperforms the proxy-based approach in terms of MTWV metric given the
comparable processing speed. Other important advantages of the OOV decoder
include extremely low memory consumption and simplicity of its implementation
and parameter optimization.
