Toroidal Probabilistic Spherical Discriminant Analysis

In speaker recognition, where speech segments are mapped to embeddings on the unit hypersphere, two scoring back-ends are commonly used, namely cosine scoring and PLDA. We have recently proposed PSDA, an analog to PLDA that uses Von Mises-Fisher distributions instead of Gaussians. In this paper, we present toroidal PSDA (T-PSDA). It extends PSDA with the ability to model within and between-speaker variabilities in toroidal submanifolds of the hypersphere. Like PLDA and PSDA, the model allows closed-form scoring and closed-form EM updates for training. On VoxCeleb, we find T-PSDA accuracy on par with cosine scoring, while PLDA accuracy is inferior. On NIST SRE'21 we find that T-PSDA gives large accuracy gains compared to both cosine scoring and PLDA.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

From Simulated Mixtures to Simulated Conversations as Training Data for End-to-End Neural Diarization

End-to-end neural diarization (EEND) is nowadays one of the most prominent research topics in speaker diarization. EEND presents an attractive alternative to standard cascaded diarization systems since a single system is trained at once to deal with the whole diarization problem. Several EEND variants and approaches are being proposed, however, all these models require large amounts of annotated data for training but available annotated data are scarce. Thus, EEND works have used mostly simulated mixtures for training. However, simulated mixtures do not resemble real conversations in many aspects. In this work we present an alternative method for creating synthetic conversations that resemble real ones by using statistics about distributions of pauses and overlaps estimated on genuine conversations. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of the source of the statistics, different augmentations and amounts of data. We demonstrate that our approach performs substantially better than the original one, while reducing the dependence on the fine-tuning stage. Experiments are carried out on 2-speaker telephone conversations of Callhome and DIHARD 3. Together with this publication, we release our implementations of EEND and the method for creating simulated conversations.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202