# Speech Activity Detection Based on Multilingual Speech Recognition System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERTraffic: BERT-based Joint Speaker Role and Speaker Change Detection for Air Traffic Control Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05781/) (2021)
- [A Virtual Simulation-Pilot Agent for Training of Air Traffic Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07842/) (2023)
- [Lessons Learned in ATCO2: 5000 hours of Air Traffic Control Communications for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01155/) (2023)
- [Streaming Non-Autoregressive Model for Accent Conversion and Pronunciation Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16580/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To better model the contextual information and increase the generalization ability of Speech Activity Detection (SAD) system, this paper leverages a multi-lingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to perform SAD. Sequence discriminative training of Acoustic Model (AM) using Lattice-Free Maximum Mutual Information (LF-MMI) loss function, effectively extracts the contextual information of the input acoustic frame. Multi-lingual AM training, causes the robustness to noise and language variabilities. The index of maximum output posterior is considered as a frame-level speech/non-speech decision function. Majority voting and logistic regression are applied to fuse the language-dependent decisions. The multi-lingual ASR is trained on 18 languages of BABEL datasets and the built SAD is evaluated on 3 different languages. On out-of-domain datasets, the proposed SAD model shows significantly better performance with respect to baseline models. On the Ester2 dataset, without using any in-domain data, this model outperforms the WebRTC, phoneme recognizer based VAD (Phn Rec), and Pyannote baselines (respectively by 7.1, 1.7, and 2.7% absolute) in Detection Error Rate (DetER) metrics. Similarly, on the LiveATC dataset, this model outperforms the WebRTC, Phn Rec, and Pyannote baselines (respectively by 6.4, 10.0, and 3.7% absolutely) in DetER metrics.