Exploring Universal Speech Attributes for Speaker Verification with an Improved Cross-stitch Network

The universal speech attributes for x-vector based speaker verification (SV) are addressed in this paper. The manner and place of articulation form the fundamental speech attribute unit (SAU), and then new speech attribute (NSA) units for acoustic modeling are generated by tied tri-SAU states. An improved cross-stitch network is adopted as a multitask learning (MTL) framework for integrating these universal speech attributes into the x-vector network training process. Experiments are conducted on common condition 5 (CC5) of the core-core and the 10 s-10 s tests of the NIST SRE10 evaluation set, and the proposed algorithm can achieve consistent improvements over the baseline x-vector on both these tasks.