ODYSSEY 2004 - The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop May 31 - June 3, 2004 Toledo, Spain

Speaker Segmentation Using the MAP-Adapted Bayesian Information Criterion

Marie Roch, Yanliang Cheng

Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University, CA, USA

The Bayesian information criterion (BIC) is a model selection criterion that has previously been applied to speaker segmentation of broadcast news by several researchers. The BIC approach treats speaker segmentation as a model selection problem. As the BIC requires the estimation of the sample covariance matrix, its performance tends to deteriorate as the speaker-turn duration decreases. It is well known that the BIC does not perform well on short segments, making the BIC inappropriate for conversational speech. In this paper, we estimate the hyperparameters of a prior distribution from a disjoint set of speakers and use the prior information to adapt the maximum a-posteriori distribution of the BIC. We show that this results in improved performance for a conversational telephone-speech corpus.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Roch, Marie / Cheng, Yanliang (2004): "Speaker segmentation using the MAP-adapted Bayesian information criterion", In ODYS-2004, 349-354.