TCG CREST System Description for the DISPLACE-M Challenge
This work addresses speaker diarization for medical conversations in noisy rural healthcare, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for a specific challenge.
The study tackled speaker diarization in noisy medical conversations by comparing modular and end-to-end systems, achieving a 39% relative improvement in diarization error rate with the Diarizen system and best results of 10.37% and 9.21% DER on development and evaluation sets.
This report presents the TCG CREST system description for Track 1 (Speaker Diarization) of the DISPLACE-M challenge, focusing on naturalistic medical conversations in noisy rural-healthcare scenarios. Our study evaluates the impact of various voice activity detection (VAD) methods and advanced clustering algorithms on overall speaker diarization (SD) performance. We compare and analyze two SD frameworks: a modular pipeline utilizing SpeechBrain with ECAPA-TDNN embeddings, and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) hybrid end-to-end neural diarization system, Diarizen, built on top of a pre-trained WavLM. With these frameworks, we explore diverse clustering techniques, including agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC), and multiple novel variants of spectral clustering, such as SC-adapt, SC-PNA, and SC-MK. Experimental results demonstrate that the Diarizen system provides an approximate $39\%$ relative improvement in the diarization error rate (DER) on the post-evaluation analysis of Phase~I compared to the SpeechBrain baseline. Our best-performing submitted system employing the Diarizen baseline with AHC employing a median filtering with a larger context window of $29$ achieved a DER of 10.37\% on the development and 9.21\% on the evaluation sets, respectively. Our team ranked sixth out of the 11 participating teams after the Phase~I evaluation.