# BERTraffic: BERT-based Joint Speaker Role and Speaker Change Detection for Air Traffic Control Communications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02846/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in Named Entity Recognition from Deep Learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11470/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Neural Speaker Diarization with Permutation-Free Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05952/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Neural Speaker Diarization with Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06247/) (2019)
- [Bayesian HMM clustering of x-vector sequences (VBx) in speaker diarization: theory, implementation and analysis on standard tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14952/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Speaker Diarization for an Unknown Number of Speakers with Encoder-Decoder Based Attractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09921/) (2020)
- [Joint Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization via Sequence Transduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05337/) (2019)
- [The Second DIHARD Diarization Challenge: Dataset, task, and baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07839/) (2019)
- [Turn-to-Diarize: Online Speaker Diarization Constrained by Transformer Transducer Speaker Turn Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11641/) (2021)
- [Speech Recognition and Multi-Speaker Diarization of Long Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08072/) (2020)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition Benchmark for Air-Traffic Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10304/) (2020)
- [The Airbus Air Traffic Control speech recognition 2018 challenge: towards ATC automatic transcription and call sign detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12614/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Speaker Segmentation and Diarization using Lexical and Acoustic Cues via Sequence to Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10731/) (2018)
- [Contextual Semi-Supervised Learning: An Approach To Leverage Air-Surveillance and Untranscribed ATC Data in ASR Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03643/) (2021)
- [BW-EDA-EEND: Streaming End-to-End Neural Speaker Diarization for a Variable Number of Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02678/) (2020)
- [Improving callsign recognition with air-surveillance data in air-traffic communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12156/) (2021)
- [Speech Activity Detection Based on Multilingual Speech Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12277/) (2020)
- [Incremental Transfer Learning in Two-pass Information Bottleneck based Speaker Diarization System for Meetings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08051/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04054/) (2022)
- [Performance evaluation of SLAM-ASR: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Way Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03866/) (2024)
- [Exploring Speaker-Related Information in Spoken Language Understanding for Better Speaker Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12927/) (2023)
- [A Virtual Simulation-Pilot Agent for Training of Air Traffic Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07842/) (2023)
- [Improving Speaker Diarization using Semantic Information: Joint Pairwise Constraints Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10456/) (2023)
- [Speech and Natural Language Processing Technologies for Pseudo-Pilot Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07164/) (2022)
- [Developing Speech Processing Pipelines for Police Accountability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06086/) (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)
- [Joint vs Sequential Speaker-Role Detection and Automatic Speech Recognition for Air-traffic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13842/) (2024)
- [Race and Privacy in Broadcast Police Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01817/) (2024)
- [ASR-Synchronized Speaker-Role Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17765/) (2025)
- [CineSRD: Leveraging Visual, Acoustic, and Linguistic Cues for Open-World Visual Media Speaker Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16966/) (2026)
- [V2TATC: Joint Voice-Trajectory Embedding and Dataset for Air Traffic Controller Situational Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28981/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) allows transcribing the communications between air traffic controllers (ATCOs) and aircraft pilots. The transcriptions are used later to extract ATC named entities, e.g., aircraft callsigns. One common challenge is speech activity detection (SAD) and speaker diarization (SD). In the failure condition, two or more segments remain in the same recording, jeopardizing the overall performance. We propose a system that combines SAD and a BERT model to perform speaker change detection and speaker role detection (SRD) by chunking ASR transcripts, i.e., SD with a defined number of speakers together with SRD. The proposed model is evaluated on real-life public ATC databases. Our BERT SD model baseline reaches up to 10% and 20% token-based Jaccard error rate (JER) in public and private ATC databases. We also achieved relative improvements of 32% and 7.7% in JERs and SD error rate (DER), respectively, compared to VBx, a well-known SD system.