Exploring some limits of Gaussian PLDA modeling for i-vector distributions
| Pierre-Michel Bousquet, Jean-François Bonastre and Driss Matrouf |
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Gaussian-PLDA (G-PLDA) modeling for i-vector based speaker verification has proven to be competitive versus heavy-tailed PLDA (HT-PLDA) based on Student’s t-distribution, when the latter is much more computationally expensive. However, its results are achieved using a length-normalization, which projects i-vectors on the non-linear and finite surface of a hypersphere. This paper investigates the limits of linear and Gaussian G-PLDA modeling when distribution of data is spherical. In particular, assumptions of homoscedasticity are questionable: the model assumes that the within-speaker variability can be estimated by a unique and linear parameter. A non-probabilistic approach is proposed, competitive with state of-the-art, which reveals some limits of the Gaussian modeling in terms of goodness of fit. We carry out an analysis of residue, which finds out a relation between the dispersion of a speaker-class and its location and, thus, shows that homoscedasticity assumptions are not fulfilled.
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