Frontiers in Psychology (Jul 2020)

Supervised Speaker Diarization Using Random Forests: A Tool for Psychotherapy Process Research

  • Lukas Fürer,
  • Nathalie Schenk,
  • Volker Roth,
  • Martin Steppan,
  • Klaus Schmeck,
  • Ronan Zimmermann,
  • Ronan Zimmermann

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01726
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11

Abstract

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Speaker diarization is the practice of determining who speaks when in audio recordings. Psychotherapy research often relies on labor intensive manual diarization. Unsupervised methods are available but yield higher error rates. We present a method for supervised speaker diarization based on random forests. It can be considered a compromise between commonly used labor-intensive manual coding and fully automated procedures. The method is validated using the EMRAI synthetic speech corpus and is made publicly available. It yields low diarization error rates (M: 5.61%, STD: 2.19). Supervised speaker diarization is a promising method for psychotherapy research and similar fields.

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