Speech style and speaker recognition: a case study

Abstract

This work presents an experimental evaluation of the effect of different speech styles on the task of speaker identification. Although the informal notion of a speaking style does not readily translate into operational procedures for eliciting speech in one style or another, we make use of willfully altered voice extracted from the CHAINS corpus and methodically assess the effect of its use in both testing and training a reference speaker identification system and a reference speaker verification system. In this work we contrast normal readings of text with two varieties of imitative styles and with the familiar, non-imitative, variant of fast speech. Furthermore, we test the applicability of a novel speech parameterization that has been suggested as a promising technique in the task of speaker identification: the pyknogram frequency estimate coefficients pykfec. The experimental evaluation indicates that both the reference verification and identification systems are affected by variations in style of the speech material used. Our case studies also indicates that the adoption of pykfec as speech encoding methodology has an overall favorable effect on the systems accuracy scores.