VISH-ASR: Viterbi-Guided Selection of Hotwords for Speech-LLM Contextual ASR

Abstract

Prompt-based contextual ASR requires selecting a compact hotword subset from large dynamic inventories, yet existing pre-selection methods rely either on discrete ASR hypotheses that may discard acoustic evidence or on separately trained retrieval models. We propose Viterbi-guided Selection of Hotwords (VISH), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that directly verifies candidate-specific acoustic support over frame-level CTC posteriors. VISH formulates pre-selection as constrained posterior search; M-VISH makes large-list verification scalable through frame-synchronous shared-prefix Viterbi search with bounded top-K pruning, while Bi-MVISH exploits complementary backward evidence for robust verification. Across five benchmarks, M-VISH achieves up to 11.7% absolute improvement in Best-F1 over a strong learned-retrieval baseline and reduces candidate-search latency by 75.2% at 2,000 candidates relative to hypothesis-based filtering. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of posterior-level verification for accurate and scalable hotword pre-selection without additional model training.