Suzy J. Styles

Hexin Liu, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Andy W. H. Khong et al.

In this paper, we propose to employ a dual-mode framework on the x-vector self-attention (XSA-LID) model with knowledge distillation (KD) to enhance its language identification (LID) performance for both long and short utterances. The dual-mode XSA-LID model is trained by jointly optimizing both the full and short modes with their respective inputs being the full-length speech and its short clip extracted by a specific Boolean mask, and KD is applied to further boost the performance on short utterances. In addition, we investigate the impact of clip-wise linguistic variability and lexical integrity for LID by analyzing the variation of LID performance in terms of the lengths and positions of the mimicked speech clips. We evaluated our approach on the MLS14 data from the NIST 2017 LRE. With the 3~s random-location Boolean mask, our proposed method achieved 19.23%, 21.52% and 8.37% relative improvement in average cost compared with the XSA-LID model on 3s, 10s, and 30s speech, respectively.

Suzy J. Styles, Victoria Y. H. Chua, Fei Ting Woon et al.

Language development experts need tools that can automatically identify languages from fluent, conversational speech, and provide reliable estimates of usage rates at the level of an individual recording. However, language identification systems are typically evaluated on metrics such as equal error rate and balanced accuracy, applied at the level of an entire speech corpus. These overview metrics do not provide information about model performance at the level of individual speakers, recordings, or units of speech with different linguistic characteristics. Overview statistics may therefore mask systematic errors in model performance for some subsets of the data, and consequently, have worse performance on data derived from some subsets of human speakers, creating a kind of algorithmic bias. In the current paper, we investigate how well a number of language identification systems perform on individual recordings and speech units with different linguistic properties in the MERLIon CCS Challenge. The Challenge dataset features accented English-Mandarin code-switched child-directed speech.