Design Guidelines for Inclusive Speaker Verification Evaluation Datasets

Wiebke Hutiri, Lauriane Gorce, Aaron Yi Ding

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Speaker verification (SV) provides billions of voice-enabled devices with access control, and ensures the security of voice-driven technologies. As a type of biometrics, it is necessary that SV is unbiased, with consistent and reliable performance across speakers irrespective of their demographic, social and economic attributes. Current SV evaluation practices are insufficient for evaluating bias: they are over-simplified and aggregate users, not representative of usage scenarios encountered in deployment, and consequences of errors are not accounted for. This paper proposes design guidelines for constructing SV evaluation datasets that address these short-comings. We propose a schema for grading the difficulty of utterance pairs, and present an algorithm for generating inclusive SV datasets. We empirically validate our proposed method in a set of experiments on the VoxCeleb1 dataset. Our results confirm that the count of utterance pairs/speaker, and the difficulty grading of utterance pairs have a significant effect on evaluation performance and variability. Our work contributes to the development of SV evaluation practices that are inclusive and fair.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1293-1297
Number of pages5
JournalProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
Volume2022-September
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event23rd Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2022 - Incheon, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 18 Sept 202222 Sept 2022

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • audit
  • bias
  • design guidelines
  • evaluation
  • fairness
  • speaker verification
  • voice biometrics

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