Previous Work: Speaker Recognition

This project is concerned with the discovery of highly speaker-characteristic behaviors ("speaker performances") for use in speaker recognition and related speech technologies. The intention is to move beyond the usual low-level short-term spectral features which dominate speaker recognition systems today, instead focusing on higher-level sources of speaker information, including idiosyncratic word usage and pronunciation, prosodic patterns, and vocal gestures.

The project goal is two-fold: to conduct fundamental research to discover new speaker-distinctive features and encode them into richer, more informative speaker models; and to evaluate the utility of these feature sets and models for speaker recognition and other speech technology applications. The feature discovery efforts are necessarily exploratory, pursuing both a "knowledge-based" track, building on existing linguistic constructs and guided by insights from psycholinguistics and human performance studies, and a more speculative "data-driven" approach, seeking idiosyncratic "vocal performances" - spectro-temporal patterns with high speaker-characterizing power, independent of linguistic constraints. Speaker Recognition Project Page