New release of Mixer-6: Improved validity for phonetic study of speaker variation and identification

Eleanor Chodroff, Matthew Maciejewski, Jan Trmal, Sanjeev Khudanpur, John Godfrey


Abstract
The Mixer series of speech corpora were collected over several years, principally to support annual NIST evaluations of speaker recognition (SR) technologies. These evaluations focused on conversational speech over a variety of channels and recording conditions. One of the series, Mixer-6, added a new condition, read speech, to support basic scientific research on speaker characteristics, as well as technology evaluation. With read speech it is possible to make relatively precise measurements of phonetic events and features, which can be correlated with the performance of speaker recognition algorithms, or directly used in phonetic analysis of speaker variability. The read speech, as originally recorded, was adequate for large-scale evaluations (e.g., fixed-text speaker ID algorithms) but only marginally suitable for acoustic-phonetic studies. Numerous errors due largely to speaker behavior remained in the corpus, with no record of their locations or rate of occurrence. We undertook the effort to correct this situation with automatic methods supplemented by human listening and annotation. The present paper describes the tools and methods, resulting corrections, and some examples of the kinds of research studies enabled by these enhancements.
Anthology ID:
L16-1210
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1323–1327
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1210
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eleanor Chodroff, Matthew Maciejewski, Jan Trmal, Sanjeev Khudanpur, and John Godfrey. 2016. New release of Mixer-6: Improved validity for phonetic study of speaker variation and identification. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1323–1327, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
New release of Mixer-6: Improved validity for phonetic study of speaker variation and identification (Chodroff et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1210.pdf