2010 Research Summary

Exploring Intrinsic Speaker Qualities Via an Analysis of Automatic Speaker Recognition Systems

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Lara Stoll and Nelson Morgan

National Science Foundation 0329258 and International Computer Science Institute

Although a great deal of progress has been made in the task of automatic speaker recognition, there are still many challenges that remain. A relatively limited amount of work has been done to investigate why system performance is better for some speakers than for others. We perform an analysis of automatic speaker recognition systems, with a focus on determining the inherent speaker characteristics that contribute to how easy (or difficult) it is to recognize a speaker correctly. We consider a range of intrinsic speaker qualities, including physical attributes, prosodic characteristics, and accents or dialects. The results of such an analysis can then be used to improve speaker recognition systems. It may also be possible to predict the system's performance for an unknown speaker using only information about speaker characteristics.