Multi-expert and hybrid connectionist approach for pattern recognition: speaker identification task

This paper presents and evaluates a modular/hybrid connectionist system for speaker identification. Modularity has emerged as a powerful technique for reducing the complexity of connectionist systems, allowing a priori knowledge to be incorporated into their design. In problems where training data are scarce, such modular systems are likely to generalize significantly better than a monolithic connectionist system. In addition, modules are not restricted to be connectionist: hybrid systems, with e.g. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), can be designed, combining the advantages of connectionist and non-connectionist approaches. Text independent speaker identification is an inherently complex task where the amount of training data is often limited. It thus provides an ideal domain to test the validity of the modular/hybrid connectionist approach. An architecture is developed in this paper which achieves this identification, based upon the cooperation of several connectionist modules, together with an HMM module. When tested on a population of 102 speakers extracted from the DARPA-TIMIT database, perfect identification was obtained. Overall, our recognition results are among the best for any text-independent speaker identification system handling this population size. In a specific comparison with a system based on multivariate auto-regressive models, the modular/hybrid connectionist approach was found to be significantly better in terms of both accuracy and speed. Our design also allows for easy incorporation of new speakers.