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If the goal is to decide whether a given speech utterance was uttered by a
male speaker or a female speaker, this particular problem of speaker
classification can be referred to as sex identification.
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When the goal is to classify a speaker within an age group, from a spoken
utterance, the problem can be called age identification.
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Some health professionals are interested in detecting pathologies using voice
samples (for instance, vocal cord disfunctionings). This problem of pathology
identification is a particular case of health state
identification .
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Any task that would consist in determining whether a speaker is angry, sad,
stressed , calm, happy, relaxed, etc. would resort to
mood identification .
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We will understand by the term accent identification any process
consisting of determining some aspects of the sociological background of the
speaker. The most realistic is certainly to try to identify regional
accent for a native speaker, or linguistic origin
for a non-native speaker.
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For some applications, it is necessary to classify a speaker with respect
to one of
several categories, the characteristics of which cannot be expressed in
objective terms This task can be covered under the general term of
speaker cluster selection.
In the special case where the goal is to identify in which language a
given speech utterance has been produced, we recommend using the term
spoken language identification instead of the usual expression
of language identification , as the latter can be confused with
written language identification.
Finally, if the task consists in finding information about the
identity of the speaker from a speech signal, it is classically
designated as speaker recognition .
For speaker classification and recognition tasks, a general
distinction must be made between identification and
verification. While identification consists in finding to
which class or speaker a speech utterance is most likely to belong,
verification aims at validating or dismissing the hypothesis
that the utterance pertains to a given class or speaker.
Examples of speaker class identification are given above.
For speaker class verification , a typical problem of
age verification would consist in checking whether a speaker is
an adult or not, and spoken language verification
would aim at
checking whether an utterance was pronounced in a given
language (the expected language of an application, for instance).
In the rest of this chapter, we will mainly focus on speaker
identification and
verification . However, most concepts are easy to
generalise to other speaker classification problems.
Next: General definitions
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