The human speech production system is a multi-level system. On the upper level, it starts with information that one wants to transmit. It ends on the lower level with the materialization of the information into a speech signal. Most of the recent work conducted in age estimation is focused on the lower-acoustic level. In this research the upper lexical level information is utilized for age-group verification and it is shown that ones vocabulary reflects ones age. Several age-group verification systems that are based on automatic transcripts are proposed. In addition, a hybrid approach is introduced, an approach that combines the word-based system and an acoustic-based system. Experiments were conducted on a four age-groups verification task using the Fisher corpora, where an average equal error rate (EER) of 28.7% was achieved using the lexical-based approach and 28.0% using an acoustic approach. By merging these two approaches the verification error was reduced to 24.1%.
Cite as: Hecht, R.M., Hezroni, O., Manna, A., Aloni-Lavi, R., Dobry, G., Alfandary, A., Zigel, Y. (2009) Age verification using a hybrid speech processing approach. Proc. Interspeech 2009, 184-187, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-71
@inproceedings{hecht09_interspeech,
author={Ron M. Hecht and Omer Hezroni and Amit Manna and Ruth Aloni-Lavi and Gil Dobry and Amir Alfandary and Yaniv Zigel},
title={{Age verification using a hybrid speech processing approach}},
year=2009,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2009},
pages={184--187},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2009-71}
}