Toward Text-independent Cross-lingual Speaker Recognition Using English-Mandarin-Taiwanese Dataset

Over 40% of the world's population is bilingual. Existing speaker identification/verification systems, however, assume the same language type for both enrollment and recognition stages. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of employing multilingual speech for biometric applications. We establish a dataset containing audio recorded in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese. Three acoustic features, namely, i-vector, d-vector and x-vector have been evaluated for both speaker verification (SV) and identification (SI) tasks. Preliminary experimental results indicate that x-vector achieves the best overall performance. Additionally, the model trained with hybrid data demonstrates the highest accuracy, at the cost of extra data collection efforts. In SI tasks, we obtained over 91 % cross-lingual accuracy in all models using 3-second audio. In SV tasks, the EER among cross-lingual test is at most 6.52 %, which is observed on the model trained by English corpus. The outcome suggests the feasibility of adopting cross-lingual speech in building text-independent speaker recognition systems.