next up previous contents index
Next: General definitions Up: Presentation Previous: Presentation

Speaker classification tasks

 

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 up previous contents index
Next: General definitions Up: Presentation Previous: Presentation

EAGLES SWLG SoftEdition, May 1997. Get the book...