Use of Vocal Source Features in Speaker Segmentation

This paper addresses the problem of speaker segmentation in telephone conversation. The segmentation is done in three steps: 1) preliminary segmentation to hypothesize speaker turning points; 2) clustering of segments; and 3) re-segmentation to determine speaker identity of each segment. It is found that vocal source related features are more speaker-discriminative than the conventional vocal tract related features for small amount of data. This motivates us to thoughtfully incorporate vocal source features into early stages of the speaker segmentation process, where decisions have to be made with limited data. Speaker segmentation experiments are carried out on 36 summed channel conversations in the NIST 2004 Speaker Recognition Evaluation. The proposed use of vocal source features leads to noticeable performance improvement