Experiments with Segmentation in an Online Speaker Diarization System.

In offline speaker diarization systems, particularly those aimed at telephone speech, the accuracy of the initial segmentation of a conversation is often a secondary concern. Imprecise segment boundaries are typically corrected during resegmentation, which is performed as the final step of the diarization process. However, such resegmentation is generally not possible in online systems, where past decisions are usually unchangeable. In such situations, correct segmentation becomes critical. In this paper, we evaluate several different segmentation approaches in the context of online diarization by comparing the overall performance of an i-vector-based diarization system set to operate in a sequential manner.