Effective Pitch Value Detection in Noisy Intelligent Environments for Efficient Natural Language Processing

Abstract

The performance of applications based on natural language processing depends primarily on the environment in which these applications are applied. Intelligent environments will be one of the major applications used to process natural language. The methods for speaker's gender classification can adapt and improve the performance of natural language processing applications. That is why, this chapter will present an effective speaker's pitch value detection in noisy environments, which then allows more robust speaker's gender classification. The chapter presents the algorithm for the speaker's pitch value detection and performs the comparison in various noisy environments. The experiments are carried out on the part of the publically available Aurora 2 speech database. The results showed that the automatically determined pitch values deviate, on average, only by 8.39 Hz from the reference pitch value. A well-defined pitch value allows a functional speaker's gender classification. In this chapter, presented speaker's gender classification works well, even at low signal to noise ratios. The experiments show that the speaker's gender classification performance at SNR 0 dB is higher than 91% when the automatically determined pitch value is used. Speaker's gender classification can then be used further in the processes of natural language processing.

Acoustic Gender and Age Classification as an Aid to Human–Computer Interaction in a Smart Home Environment

“…Therefore, we chose the pitch value as one of the more essential features in our proposed procedure. We presented the VAD algorithm and the pitch value determination in one of our previous works [36]. We enhance the procedures in this paper to improve the algorithm's performance, which we also describe in more detail in this section's second and third subsections.…”