Adaptive articulatory feature-based conditional pronunciation modeling for speaker verification

Because of the differences in education background, accents, and so on, different persons have different ways of pronunciation. Therefore, the pronunciation patterns of individuals call be used as features for discriminating speakers. This paper exploits the pronunciation characteristics of speakers and proposes a new conditional pronunciation modeling (CPM) technique for speaker verification. The proposed technique establishes a link between articulatory properties (e.g., manners and places of articulation) and phonerne sequences produced by a speaker. This is achieved by aligning two articulatory feature (AF) streams with a phoneme sequence determined by a phoneme recognizer, which is followed by formulating the probabilities of articulatory classes conditioned oil the phonemes as speaker-dependent discrete probabilistic models. The scores obtained from the AF-based pronunciation models are then fused with those obtained from spectral-based acoustic models. A frame-weighted fusion approach is introduced to weight the frame-based fused scores based oil the confidence of observing the articulatory classes. The effectiveness of AF-based CPM and the frame-weighted approach is demonstrated in a speaker verification task. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Reconnaissance automatique du locuteur par des GMM à grande marge

Depuis plusieurs dizaines d'années, la reconnaissance automatique du locuteur (RAL) fait l'objet de travaux de recherche entrepris par de nombreuses équipes dans le monde. La majorité des systèmes actuels sont basés sur l'utilisation des Modèles de Mélange de lois Gaussiennes (GMM) et/ou des modèles discriminants SVM, i.e., les machines à vecteurs de support. Nos travaux ont pour objectif général la proposition d'utiliser de nouveaux modèles GMM à grande marge pour la RAL qui soient une alternative aux modèles GMM génératifs classiques et à l'approche discriminante état de l'art GMM-SVM. Nous appelons ces modèles LM-dGMM pour Large Margin diagonal GMM. Nos modèles reposent sur une récente technique discriminante pour la séparation multi-classes, qui a été appliquée en reconnaissance de la parole. Exploitant les propriétés des systèmes GMM utilisés en RAL, nous présentons dans cette thèse des variantes d'algorithmes d'apprentissage discriminant des GMM minimisant une fonction de perte à grande marge. Des tests effectués sur les tâches de reconnaissance du locuteur de la campagne d'évaluation NIST-SRE 2006 démontrent l'intérêt de ces modèles en reconnaissance.Most of state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems are based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), trained using maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. The generative training of the GMM does not however directly optimize the classification performance. For this reason, discriminative models, e.g., Support Vector Machines (SVM), have been an interesting alternative since they address directly the classification problem, and they lead to good performances. Recently a new discriminative approach for multiway classification has been proposed, the Large Margin Gaussian mixture models (LM-GMM). As in SVM, the parameters of LM-GMM are trained by solving a convex optimization problem. However they differ from SVM by using ellipsoids to model the classes directly in the input space, instead of half-spaces in an extended high-dimensional space. While LM-GMM have been used in speech recognition, they have not been used in speaker recognition (to the best of our knowledge). In this thesis, we propose simplified, fast and more efficient versions of LM-GMM which exploit the properties and characteristics of speaker recognition applications and systems, the LM-dGMM models. In our LM-dGMM modeling, each class is initially modeled by a GMM trained by MAP adaptation of a Universal Background Model (UBM) or directly initialized by the UBM. The models mean vectors are then re-estimated under some Large Margin constraints. We carried out experiments on full speaker recognition tasks under the NIST-SRE 2006 core condition. The experimental results are very satisfactory and show that our Large Margin modeling approach is very promising