Speaker-turn aware diarization for speech-based cognitive assessments

Introduction: Speaker diarization is an essential preprocessing step for diagnosing cognitive impairments from speech-based Montreal cognitive assessments (MoCA). Methods: This paper proposes three enhancements to the conventional speaker diarization methods for such assessments. The enhancements tackle the challenges of diarizing MoCA recordings on two fronts. First, multi-scale channel interdependence speaker embedding is used as the front-end speaker representation for overcoming the acoustic mismatch caused by far-field microphones. Specifically, a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) unit and channel-dependent attention are added to Res2Net blocks for multi-scale feature aggregation. Second, a sequence comparison approach with a holistic view of the whole conversation is applied to measure the similarity of short speech segments in the conversation, which results in a speaker-turn aware scoring matrix for the subsequent clustering step. Third, to further enhance the diarization performance, we propose incorporating a pairwise similarity measure so that the speaker-turn aware scoring matrix contains both local and global information across the segments. Results: Evaluations on an interactive MoCA dataset show that the proposed enhancements lead to a diarization system that outperforms the conventional x-vector/PLDA systems under language-, age-, and microphone-mismatch scenarios. Discussion: The results also show that the proposed enhancements can help hypothesize the speaker-turn timestamps, making the diarization method amendable to datasets without timestamp information.