A novel speaker clustering algorithm via supervised affinity propagation

This paper addresses the problem of speaker clustering in telephone conversations. Recently, a new clustering algorithm named affinity propagation (AP) is proposed. It exhibits fast execution speed and finds clusters with low error. However, AP is an unsupervised approach which may make the resulting number of clusters different from the actual one. This deteriorates the speaker purity dramatically. This paper proposes a modified method named supervised affinity propagation (SAP), which automatically reruns the AP procedure to make the final number of clusters converge to the specified number. Experiments are carried out to compare SAP with traditional k-means and agglomerative hierarchical clustering on 4-hour summed channel conversations in the NIST 2004 Speaker Recognition Evaluation. Experiment results show that the SAP method leads to a noticeable speaker purity improvement with slight cluster purity decrease compared with AP.