Never-ending learning system for on-line speaker diarization

Abstract

In this paper, we describe new high-performance on-line speaker diarization system which works faster than real-time and has very low latency. It consists of several modules including voice activity detection, novel speaker detection, speaker gender and speaker identity classification. All modules share a set of Gaussian mixture models (GMM) representing pause, male and female speakers, and each individual speaker. Initially, there are only three GMMs for pause and two speaker genders, trained in advance from some data. During the speaker diarization process, for each speech segment it is decided whether it comes from a new speaker or from already known speaker. In case of a new speaker, his/her gender is identified, and then, from the corresponding gender GMM, a new GMM is spawned by copying its parameters. This GMM is learned on-line using the speech segment data and from this point it is used to represent the new speaker. All individual speaker models are produced in this way. In the case of an old speaker, s/he is identified and the corresponding GMM is again learned on-line. In order to prevent an unlimited grow of the speaker model number, those models that have not been selected as winners for a long period of time are deleted from the system. This allows the system to be able to perform its task indefinitely in addition to being capable of self-organization, i.e. unsupervised adaptive learning, and preservation of the learned knowledge, i.e. speakers. Such functionalities are attributed to the so called Never-Ending Learning systems. For evaluation, we used part of the TC-STAR database consisting of European Parliament Plenary speeches. The results show that this system achieves a speaker diarization error rate of 4.6% with latency of at most 3 seconds.