Role Recognition in Broadcast News Using Social Network Analysis and Duration Distribution Modeling

This paper presents two approaches for speaker role recognition in multiparty audio recordings. The experiments are performed over a corpus of 96 radio bulletins corresponding to roughly 19 hours of material. Each recording involves, on average, eleven speakers playing one among six roles belonging to a predefined set. Both proposed approaches start by segmenting automatically the recordings into single speaker segments, but perform role recognition using different techniques. The first approach is based on Social Network Analysis, the second relies on the intervention duration distribution across different speakers. The two approaches are used separately and combined and the results show that around 85 percent of the recordings time can be labeled correctly in terms of role.