3,441 research outputs found
Detection and handling of overlapping speech for speaker diarization
For the last several years, speaker diarization has been attracting substantial research attention as one of the spoken
language technologies applied for the improvement, or enrichment, of recording transcriptions. Recordings of meetings,
compared to other domains, exhibit an increased complexity due to the spontaneity of speech, reverberation effects, and also
due to the presence of overlapping speech.
Overlapping speech refers to situations when two or more speakers are speaking simultaneously. In meeting data, a
substantial portion of errors of the conventional speaker diarization systems can be ascribed to speaker overlaps, since usually
only one speaker label is assigned per segment. Furthermore, simultaneous speech included in training data can eventually
lead to corrupt single-speaker models and thus to a worse segmentation.
This thesis concerns the detection of overlapping speech segments and its further application for the improvement of speaker
diarization performance. We propose the use of three spatial cross-correlationbased parameters for overlap detection on
distant microphone channel data. Spatial features from different microphone pairs are fused by means of principal component
analysis, linear discriminant analysis, or by a multi-layer perceptron.
In addition, we also investigate the possibility of employing longterm prosodic information. The most suitable subset from a set
of candidate prosodic features is determined in two steps. Firstly, a ranking according to mRMR criterion is obtained, and then,
a standard hill-climbing wrapper approach is applied in order to determine the optimal number of features.
The novel spatial as well as prosodic parameters are used in combination with spectral-based features suggested previously in
the literature. In experiments conducted on AMI meeting data, we show that the newly proposed features do contribute to the
detection of overlapping speech, especially on data originating from a single recording site.
In speaker diarization, for segments including detected speaker overlap, a second speaker label is picked, and such segments
are also discarded from the model training. The proposed overlap labeling technique is integrated in Viterbi decoding, a part of
the diarization algorithm. During the system development it was discovered that it is favorable to do an independent
optimization of overlap exclusion and labeling with respect to the overlap detection system.
We report improvements over the baseline diarization system on both single- and multi-site AMI data. Preliminary experiments
with NIST RT data show DER improvement on the RT Âż09 meeting recordings as well.
The addition of beamforming and TDOA feature stream into the baseline diarization system, which was aimed at improving the
clustering process, results in a bit higher effectiveness of the overlap labeling algorithm. A more detailed analysis on the
overlap exclusion behavior reveals big improvement contrasts between individual meeting recordings as well as between
various settings of the overlap detection operation point. However, a high performance variability across different recordings is
also typical of the baseline diarization system, without any overlap handling
Audio source separation into the wild
International audienceThis review chapter is dedicated to multichannel audio source separation in real-life environment. We explore some of the major achievements in the field and discuss some of the remaining challenges. We will explore several important practical scenarios, e.g. moving sources and/or microphones, varying number of sources and sensors, high reverberation levels, spatially diffuse sources, and synchronization problems. Several applications such as smart assistants, cellular phones, hearing aids and robots, will be discussed. Our perspectives on the future of the field will be given as concluding remarks of this chapter
Speech Recognition
Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes
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