NIST 2007 Language Recognition Evaluation: From the Perspective of IIR

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Intersession Variability Compensation in Language and Speaker Identification

Variabilita kanálu a hovoru je velmi důležitým problémem v úloze rozpoznávání mluvčího. V současné době je ve velkém množství vědeckých článků uvedeno několik technik pro kompenzaci vlivu kanálu. Kompenzace vlivu kanálu může být implementována jak v doméně modelu, tak i v doménách příznaků i skóre. Relativně nová výkoná technika je takzvaná eigenchannel adaptace pro GMM (Gaussian Mixture Models). Mevýhodou této metody je nemožnost její aplikace na jiné klasifikátory, jako napřílad takzvané SVM (Support Vector Machines), GMM s různým počtem Gausových komponent nebo v rozpoznávání řeči s použitím skrytých markovových modelů (HMM). Řešením může být aproximace této metody, eigenchannel adaptace v doméně příznaků. Obě tyto techniky, eigenchannel adaptace v doméně modelu a doméně příznaků v systémech rozpoznávání mluvčího, jsou uvedeny v této práci. Po dosažení dobrých výsledků v rozpoznávání mluvčího, byl přínos těchto technik zkoumán pro akustický systém rozpoznávání jazyka zahrnující 14 jazyků. V této úloze má nežádoucí vliv nejen variabilita kanálu, ale i variabilita mluvčího. Výsledky jsou prezentovány na datech definovaných pro evaluaci rozpoznávání mluvčího z roku 2006 a evaluaci rozpoznávání jazyka v roce 2007, obě organizované Amerických Národním Institutem pro Standard a Technologie (NIST)Varibiality in the channel and session is an important issue in the text-independent speaker recognition task. To date, several techniques providing channel and session variability compensation were introduced in a number of scientic papers. Such implementation can be done in feature, model and score domain. Relatively new and powerful approach to remove channel distortion is so-called eigenchannel adaptation for Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The drawback of the technique is that it is not applicable in its original implementation to different types of classifiers, eg. Support Vector Machines (SVM), GMM with different number of Gaussians or in speech recognition task using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The solution can be the approximation of the technique, eigenchannel adaptation in feature domain. Both, the original eigenchannel adaptation and eigenchannel adaptation on features in task of speaker recognition are presented. After achieving good results in speaker recognition, contribution of the same techniques was examined in acoustic language identification system with $14$ languages. In this task undesired factors are channel and speaker variability. Presented results are presented on the NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2006 data and NIST Language Recognition Evaluation 2007 data.

Time–Frequency Cepstral Features and Heteroscedastic Linear Discriminant Analysis for Language Recognition

The shifted delta cepstrum (SDC) is a widely used feature extraction for language recognition (LRE). With a high context width due to incorporation of multiple frames, SDC outperforms traditional delta and acceleration feature vectors. However, it also introduces correlation into the concatenated feature vector, which increases redundancy and may degrade the performance of backend classifiers. In this paper, we first propose a time-frequency cepstral (TFC) feature vector, which is obtained by performing a temporal discrete cosine transform (DCT) on the cepstrum matrix and selecting the transformed elements in a zigzag scan order. Beyond this, we increase discriminability through a heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA) on the full cepstrum matrix. By utilizing block diagonal matrix constraints, the large HLDA problem is then reduced to several smaller HLDA problems, creating a block diagonal HLDA (BDHLDA) algorithm which has much lower computational complexity. The BDHLDA method is finally extended to the GMM domain, using the simpler TFC features during re-estimation to provide significantly improved computation speed. Experiments on NIST 2003 and 2007 LRE evaluation corpora show that TFC is more effective than SDC, and that the GMM-based BDHLDA results in lower equal error rate (EER) and minimum average cost (Cavg) than either TFC or SDC approaches

I4U Submission to NIST SRE 2018: Leveraging from a Decade of Shared Experiences

The I4U consortium was established to facilitate a joint entry to NIST speaker recognition evaluations (SRE). The latest edition of such joint submission was in SRE 2018, in which the I4U submission was among the best-performing systems. SRE'18 also marks the 10-year anniversary of I4U consortium into NIST SRE series of evaluation. The primary objective of the current paper is to summarize the results and lessons learned based on the twelve sub-systems and their fusion submitted to SRE'18. It is also our intention to present a shared view on the advancements, progresses, and major paradigm shifts that we have witnessed as an SRE participant in the past decade from SRE'08 to SRE'18. In this regard, we have seen, among others, a paradigm shift from supervector representation to deep speaker embedding, and a switch of research challenge from channel compensation to domain adaptation.Comment: 5 page

Homogenous Ensemble Phonotactic Language Recognition Based on SVM Supervector Reconstruction

Currently, acoustic spoken language recognition (SLR) and phonotactic SLR systems are widely used language recognition systems. To achieve better performance, researchers combine multiple subsystems with the results often much better than a single SLR system. Phonotactic SLR subsystems may vary in the acoustic features vectors or include multiple language-specific phone recognizers and different acoustic models. These methods achieve good performance but usually compute at high computational cost. In this paper, a new diversification for phonotactic language recognition systems is proposed using vector space models by support vector machine (SVM) supervector reconstruction (SSR). In this architecture, the subsystems share the same feature extraction, decoding, and N-gram counting preprocessing steps, but model in a different vector space by using the SSR algorithm without significant additional computation. We term this a homogeneous ensemble phonotactic language recognition (HEPLR) system. The system integrates three different SVM supervector reconstruction algorithms, including relative SVM supervector reconstruction, functional SVM supervector reconstruction, and perturbing SVM supervector reconstruction. All of the algorithms are incorporated using a linear discriminant analysis-maximum mutual information (LDA-MMI) backend for improving language recognition evaluation (LRE) accuracy. Evaluated on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) LRE 2009 task, the proposed HEPLR system achieves better performance than a baseline phone recognition-vector space modeling (PR-VSM) system with minimal extra computational cost. The performance of the HEPLR system yields 1.39%, 3.63%, and 14.79% equal error rate (EER), representing 6.06%, 10.15%, and 10.53% relative improvements over the baseline system, respectively, for the 30-, 10-, and 3-s test conditions

Structure-semantics interplay in complex networks and its effects on the predictability of similarity in texts

There are different ways to define similarity for grouping similar texts into clusters, as the concept of similarity may depend on the purpose of the task. For instance, in topic extraction similar texts mean those within the same semantic field, whereas in author recognition stylistic features should be considered. In this study, we introduce ways to classify texts employing concepts of complex networks, which may be able to capture syntactic, semantic and even pragmatic features. The interplay between the various metrics of the complex networks is analyzed with three applications, namely identification of machine translation (MT) systems, evaluation of quality of machine translated texts and authorship recognition. We shall show that topological features of the networks representing texts can enhance the ability to identify MT systems in particular cases. For evaluating the quality of MT texts, on the other hand, high correlation was obtained with methods capable of capturing the semantics. This was expected because the golden standards used are themselves based on word co-occurrence. Notwithstanding, the Katz similarity, which involves semantic and structure in the comparison of texts, achieved the highest correlation with the NIST measurement, indicating that in some cases the combination of both approaches can improve the ability to quantify quality in MT. In authorship recognition, again the topological features were relevant in some contexts, though for the books and authors analyzed good results were obtained with semantic features as well. Because hybrid approaches encompassing semantic and topological features have not been extensively used, we believe that the methodology proposed here may be useful to enhance text classification considerably, as it combines well-established strategies

From features to speaker vectors by means of restricted Boltzmann machine adaptation

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) have shown success in different stages of speaker recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to produce a vector-based representation for each speaker, which will be referred to as RBM-vector. This new approach maps the speaker spectral features to a single fixed-dimensional vector carrying speaker-specific information. In this work, a global model, referred to as Universal RBM (URBM), is trained taking advantage of RBM unsupervised learning capabilities. Then, this URBM is adapted to the data of each speaker in the development, enrolment and evaluation datasets. The network connection weights of the adapted RBMs are further concatenated and subject to a whitening with dimension reduction stage to build the speaker vectors. The evaluation is performed on the core test condition of the NIST SRE 2006 database, and it is shown that RBM-vectors achieve 15% relative improvement in terms of EER compared to i-vectors using cosine scoring. The score fusion with i-vector attains more than 24% relative improvement. The interest of this result for score fusion yields on the fact that both vectors are produced in an unsupervised fashion and can be used instead of i-vector/PLDA approach, when no data label is available. Results obtained for RBM-vector/PLDA framework is comparable with the ones from i-vector/PLDA. Their score fusion achieves 14% relative improvement compared to i-vector/PLDA.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version