Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper:	SLP-L5.2
Session:	Advances in Speaker Recognition
Time:	Wednesday, May 17, 14:20 - 14:40
Presentation:	Lecture
Topic:	Speech and Spoken Language Processing: Speaker Verification
Title:	The Contribution of Cepstral and Stylistic Features to SRI’S 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation System
Authors:	Luciana Ferrer, Stanford University, United States; Elizabeth Shriberg, Sachin Kajarekar, Andreas Stolcke, Kemal Sonmez, Anand Venkataraman, Harry Bratt, SRI International, United States
Abstract:	Recent work in speaker recognition has demonstrated the advantage of modeling stylistic features in addition to traditional cepstral features, but to date there has been little study of the relative contributions of these different feature types to a state-of-the-art system. In this paper we provide such an analysis, based on SRI’s submission to the NIST 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation. The system consists of 7 subsystems (3 cepstral, 4 stylistic). By running independent N-way subsystem combinations for increasing values of N, we find that (1) a monotonic pattern in the choice of the best N systems allows for the inference of subsystem importance; (2) the ordering of subsystems alternates between cepstral and stylistic; (3) syllable-based prosodic features are the strongest stylistic features, and (4) overall subsystem ordering depends crucially on the amount of training data (1 versus 8 conversation sides). Improvements over the baseline cepstral system, when all systems are combined, range from 47% to 67%, with larger improvements for the 8-side condition. These results provide direct evidence of the complementary contributions of cepstral and stylistic features to speaker discrimination.