Residual Information in Deep Speaker Embedding Architectures

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how well deep speaker embeddings disentangle speaker identity from other speech factors, revealing residual information related to recording conditions, content, and duration across recent architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis method to quantify residual information in speaker embeddings and assesses multiple architectures using a large, controlled speech dataset.

Findings

High discriminative power of embeddings confirmed

Residual information correlates with recording conditions and content

Embeddings still contain non-speaker-specific information

Abstract

Speaker embeddings represent a means to extract representative vectorial representations from a speech signal such that the representation pertains to the speaker identity alone. The embeddings are commonly used to classify and discriminate between different speakers. However, there is no objective measure to evaluate the ability of a speaker embedding to disentangle the speaker identity from the other speech characteristics. This means that the embeddings are far from ideal, highly dependent on the training corpus and still include a degree of residual information pertaining to factors such as linguistic content, recording conditions or speaking style of the utterance. This paper introduces an analysis over six sets of speaker embeddings extracted with some of the most recent and high-performing DNN architectures, and in particular, the degree to which they are able to truly disentangle the speaker identity from the speech signal. To correctly evaluate the architectures, a large multi-speaker parallel speech dataset is used. The dataset includes 46 speakers uttering the same set of prompts, recorded in either a professional studio or their home environments. The analysis looks into the intra- and inter-speaker similarity measures computed over the different embedding sets, as well as if simple classification and regression methods are able to extract several residual information factors from the speaker embeddings. The results show that the discriminative power of the analyzed embeddings is very high, yet across all the analyzed architectures, residual information is still present in the representations in the form of a high correlation to the recording conditions, linguistic contents and utterance duration.