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1. Child vs Adult Speaker Diarization of naturalistic audio recordings in preschool environment using Deep Neural Networks

   Kothalkar, P.; Hansen, J.H.L.; Buzhardt, J.; Irvin, D.; Rous, B. (March 2021, ASEE 2021 Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Speech and language development in children is crucial for ensuring optimal outcomes in their long term development and life-long educational journey. A child’s vocabulary size at the time of kindergarten entry is an early indicator of learning to read and potential long-term success in school. The preschool classroom is thus a promising venue for monitoring growth in young children by measuring their interactions with teachers and classmates. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies provide the ability for ‘Early Childhood’ researchers for automatically analyzing naturalistic recordings in these settings. For this purpose, data are collected in a high-quality childcare center in the United States using Language Environment Analysis (LENA) devices worn by the preschool children. A preliminary task for ASR of daylong audio recordings would involve diarization, i.e., segmenting speech into smaller parts for identifying ‘who spoke when.’ This study investigates a Deep Learning-based diarization system for classroom interactions of 3-5-year-old children. However, the focus is on ’speaker group’ diarization, which includes classifying speech segments as being from adults or children from across multiple classrooms. SincNet based diarization systems achieve utterance level Diarization Error Rate of 19.1%. Utterance level speaker group confusion matrices also show promising, balanced results. These diarization systems have potential applications in developing metrics for adult-to-child or child-to-child rapid conversational turns in a naturalistic noisy early childhood setting. Such technical advancements will also help teachers better and more efficiently quantify and understand their interactions with children, make changes as needed, and monitor the impact of those changes. 

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2. Child-adult speech diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms using room-independent ResNet model and automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0024353  

   Kothalkar, Prasanna V; Hansen, John_H L; Irvin, Dwight; Buzhardt, Jay (February 2024, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing naturalistic vs controlled lab recordings to measure both quality and quantity of such interactions. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to the diversity of acoustic events/conditions in such daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology would need to be advanced to address this challenging domain for segmenting audio as well as information extraction. This study investigates alternate deep learning-based lightweight, knowledge-distilled, diarization solutions for segmenting classroom interactions of 3–5 years old children with teachers. In this context, the focus on speech-type diarization which classifies speech segments as being either from adults or children partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our lightest CNN model achieves a best F1-score of ∼76.0% on data from two classrooms, based on dev and test sets of each classroom. It is utilized with automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation modules to perform child-adult diarization. Additionally, F1-scores are obtained for individual segments with corresponding speaker tags (e.g., adult vs child), which provide knowledge for educators on child engagement through naturalistic communications. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults. The resulting child communication metrics have been used for broad-based feedback for teachers with the help of visualizations. 

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3. End-to-end Child-Adult Speech Diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms using room-independent ResNet model

   Kothalkar, P.V. (May 2023, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (submitted))

   Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing naturalistic vs. controlled lab recordings to measure both quality and quantity of such interactions. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to the diversity of acoustic events/conditions in such daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology would need to be advanced to address this challenging domain for segmenting audio as well as information extraction. This study investigates an alternate Deep Learning-based diarization solution for segmenting classroom interactions of 3-5 year old children with teachers. In this context, the focus on speech-type diarization which classifies speech segments as being either from adults or children partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our proposed ResNet model achieves a best F1-score of ∼78.0% on data from two classrooms, based on dev and test sets of each classroom. It is utilized with Automatic Speech Recognition-based resegmentation modules to perform child-adult diarization. Additionally, F1-scores are obtained for individual segments with corresponding speaker tags (e.g., adult vs. child), which provide knowledge for educators on child engagement through naturalistic communications. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults. The resulting child communication metrics have been used for broad-based feedback for teachers with the help of visualizations. 

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4. End-to-end Child-Adult Speech Diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms using room-independent ResNet model

   Kothalkar, P.V.; Buzhardt, J.; Irvin, D.; Hansen, J.H.L. (August 2022, The journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing naturalistic vs. controlled lab recordings to measure both quality and quantity of such interactions. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to the diversity of acoustic events/conditions in such daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology would need to be advanced to address this challenging domain for segmenting audio as well as information extraction. This study investigates an alternate Deep Learning-based diarization solution for segmenting classroom interactions of 3-5 year old children with teachers. In this context, the focus on speech-type diarization which classifies speech segments as being either from adults or children partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our proposed ResNet model achieves a best F1-score of ∼71.0% on data from two classrooms, based on dev and test sets of each classroom. Additionally, F1-scores are obtained for individual segments with corresponding speaker tags (e.g., adult vs. child), which provide knowledge for educators on child engagement through naturalistic communications. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults. The resulting child communication metrics have been used for broad-based feedback for teachers with the help of visualizations. 

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5. Multi-Channel Conversational Speaker Separation via Neural Diarization

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2024.3393726  

   Taherian, Hassan; Wang, DeLiang (January 2024, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing)

   When dealing with overlapped speech, the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems substantially degrades as they are designed for single-talker speech. To enhance ASR performance in conversational or meeting environments, continuous speaker separation (CSS) is commonly employed. However, CSS requires a short separation window to avoid many speakers inside the window and sequential grouping of discontinuous speech segments. To address these limitations, we introduce a new multi-channel framework called “speaker separation via neural diarization” (SSND) for meeting environments. Our approach utilizes an end-to-end diarization system to identify the speech activity of each individual speaker. By leveraging estimated speaker boundaries, we generate a sequence of embeddings, which in turn facilitate the assignment of speakers to the outputs of a multi-talker separation model. SSND addresses the permutation ambiguity issue of talker-independent speaker separation during the diarization phase through location-based training, rather than during the separation process. This unique approach allows multiple non-overlapped speakers to be assigned to the same output stream, making it possible to efficiently process long segments—a task impossible with CSS. Additionally, SSND is naturally suitable for speaker-attributed ASR. We evaluate our proposed diarization and separation methods on the open LibriCSS dataset, advancing state-of-the-art diarization and ASR results by a large margin. 

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