Human and Machine Speaker Recognition Based on Short Trivial Events
Table 3: DER of human test on trivial events.
['DER% Cough', 'DER% Laugh', 'DER% ‘Hmm’', 'DER% ‘Tsk-tsk’', 'DER% ‘Ahem’', 'DER% Sniff']
During the human test, the listener is presented 36 YES/ NO questions, 6 questions per event type. For each question, the listener is asked to listen to two speech segments that are randomly sampled from the same event type, with a probability of 50% to be from the same speaker. Listeners are allowed to perform the test multiple times. We collected 33 test sessions, amounting to 1,188 trials in total. The performance is evaluated in terms of detection error rate (DER), which is the proportion of the incorrect answers within the whole trials, including both false alarms and false rejections. It can be seen that humans can tell the speaker from a very short trivial event, particularly with the nasal sound ‘hmm’. For cough, laugh and ‘ahem’, humans can obtain some speaker information, but the performance is lower. For ‘tsk-tsk’ and sniff, the performance is very bad, and the answers given by the listeners are almost random. This is expected to some extent, as these two types of events sound rather weak, and producing them does not use much of vocal fold and vocal tract.