Speaker recognition using prosodic and lexical features

Abstract

Conventional speaker recognition systems identify speakers by using spectral information from very short slices of speech. Such systems perform well (especially in quiet conditions), but fail to capture idiosyncratic longer-term patterns in a speaker's habitual speaking style, including duration and pausing patterns, intonation contours, and the use of particular phrases. We investigate the contribution of modeling such prosodic and lexical patterns, on performance in the NIST 2003 Speaker Recognition Evaluation extended data task. We report results for: (1) systems based on individual feature types alone; (2) systems in combination with a state-of-the-art frame-based baseline system; (3) an all-system combination. Our results show that certain longer-term stylistic features provide powerful complementary information to both frame-level cepstral features and to each other. Stylistic features thus significantly improve speaker recognition performance over conventional systems, and offer promise for a variety of intelligence and security applications.