Alexander Polok , Dominik Klement , Martin Kocour , Jiangyu Han , Federico Landini , Bolaji Yusuf , Matthew Wiesner , Sanjeev Khudanpur , Jan Černocký , Lukáš Burget
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multi-speaker environments remains a significant challenge, particularly when systems conditioned on speaker embeddings fail to generalize to unseen speakers. In this work, we propose Diarization-Conditioned Whisper (DiCoW), a novel approach to target-speaker ASR that leverages speaker diarization outputs as conditioning information. DiCoW extends the pre-trained Whisper model by integrating diarization labels directly, eliminating reliance on speaker embeddings and reducing the need for extensive speaker-specific training data. Our method introduces frame-level diarization-dependent transformations (FDDT) and query-key biasing (QKb) techniques to refine the model’s focus on target speakers while effectively handling overlapping speech. By leveraging diarization outputs as conditioning signals, DiCoW simplifies the workflow for multi-speaker ASR, improves generalization to unseen speakers and enables more reliable transcription in real-world multi-speaker recordings. Additionally, we explore the integration of a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) head to Whisper and demonstrate its ability to improve transcription efficiency through hybrid decoding. Notably, we show that our approach is not limited to Whisper; it also provides similar benefits when applied to the Branchformer model. We validate DiCoW on real-world datasets, including AMI and NOTSOFAR-1 from CHiME-8 challenge, as well as synthetic benchmarks such as Libri2Mix and LibriCSS, enabling direct comparisons with previous methods. Results demonstrate that DiCoW enhances the model’s target-speaker ASR capabilities while maintaining Whisper’s accuracy and robustness on single-speaker data.
期刊介绍:
Computer Speech & Language publishes reports of original research related to the recognition, understanding, production, coding and mining of speech and language.
The speech and language sciences have a long history, but it is only relatively recently that large-scale implementation of and experimentation with complex models of speech and language processing has become feasible. Such research is often carried out somewhat separately by practitioners of artificial intelligence, computer science, electronic engineering, information retrieval, linguistics, phonetics, or psychology.