Humans and machines: novel methods for testing speaker recognition performance

Posted on 6 July 2021

Cross departmental research project in York has been awarded an AHRC grant

The Department of Language and Linguistic Science is delighted to announce that Dr Vince Hughes and Prof.Carmen Llamas have been awarded an Art and Humanities Research Council grant for 2021-22 for their project 'Humans and machines: novel methods for testing speaker recognition performance’.

'Humans and machines: novel methods for testing speaker recognition performance’ will start in Autumn 2021 and will run for 18 months as a cross departmental collaboration between the Dept of Language and Linguistic Science and the Digital Creativity Labs at York. It will also involve the appointment of a postdoctoral researcher and a software engineer.

How well do humans and machines recognise people from their voices? This project will examine the speaker recognition performance of human listeners (lay people) and machines (automatic speaker recognition systems), comparing the conditions under which the different methods outperform one another. The project will also combine human and machine responses in order to improve overall performance. As part of the collaboration with the Digital Creativity Labs, the project will create a novel computer game to elicit responses from human participants that are equivalent to the type of statistical responses that machines produce. The game will have multiple levels to assess the extent to which human responses are affected by different types of contextual information (for example, do people give stronger responses when they are told that the voices they are listening to are part of evidence in a criminal trial?). Finally, the project will test the viability of using computer games to conduct linguistic data collection.

“We are really excited about the project and about the collaboration with DC Labs. The results will have important implications for applications of speaker recognition, such as forensic speech science. We also really hope that the project will pave the way for future games to be developed for linguistic research.” - Prof.Carmen Llamas & Dr Vince Hughes, Dept. Language and Linguistic Science