Abstract-A speaker diarization system based on an information theoretic framework is described. The problem is formulated according to the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Unlike other approaches where the distance between speaker segments is arbitrarily introduced, the IB method seeks the partition that maximizes the mutual information between observations and variables relevant for the problem while minimizing the distortion between observations. This solves the problem of choosing the distance between speech segments, which becomes the Jensen-Shannon divergence as it arises from the IB objective function optimization. We discuss issues related to speaker diarization using this information theoretic framework such as the criteria for inferring the number of speakers, the tradeoff between quality and compression achieved by the diarization system, and the algorithms for optimizing the objective function. Furthermore, we benchmark the proposed system against a state-of-the-art system on the NIST RT06 (Rich Transcription) data set for speaker diarization of meetings. The IB-based system achieves a diarization error rate of 23.2% compared to 23.6% for the baseline system. This approach being mainly based on nonparametric clustering, it runs significantly faster than the baseline HMM/GMM based system, resulting in faster-than-real-time diarization.

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the use of agglomerative Information Bottleneck (aIB) clustering for the speaker diarization task of meetings data. In contrary to the state-of-the-art diarization systems that models individual speakers with Gaussian Mixture Models, the proposed algorithm is completely non parametric . Both clustering and model selection issues of nonparametric models are addressed in this work. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on meeting data on the RT06 evaluation data set. The system is able to achieve Diarization Error Rates comparable to state-of-the-art systems at a much lower computational complexity.2 IDIAP-RR 07-31

This correspondence describes a novel system for speaker diarization of meetings recordings based on the combination of acoustic features (MFCC) and Time Delay of Arrivals (TDOA). The first part of the paper analyzes differences between MFCC and TDOA features which possess completely different statistical properties. When Gaussian Mixture Models are used, experiments reveal that the diarization system is sensitive to the different recording scenarios (i.e. meeting rooms with varying number of microphones). In the second part, a new multistream diarization system is proposed extending previous work on Information Theoretic diarization. Both speaker clustering and speaker realignment steps are discussed; in contrary to current systems, the proposed method avoids to perform the feature combination averaging log-likelihood scores. Experiments on meetings data reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the GMM based system when the recording is done with varying number of microphones.

No abstract

No abstract

Speaker diarization for meetings data are recently converging towards multistream systems. The most common complementary features used in combination with MFCC are Time Delay of Arrival (TDOA). Also other features have been proposed although, there are no reported improvements on top of MFCC+TDOA systems. In this work we investigate the combination of other feature sets along with MFCC+TDOA. We discuss issues and problems related to the weighting of four different streams proposing a solution based on a smoothed version of the speaker error. Experiments are presented on NIST RT06 meeting diarization evaluation. Results reveal that the combination of four acoustic feature streams results in a 30% relative improvement with respect to the MFCC+TDOA feature combination. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first successful attempt to improve the MFCC+TDOA baseline including other feature streams.

No abstract

No abstract