AUTHOR=Fürer Lukas , Schenk Nathalie , Roth Volker , Steppan Martin , Schmeck Klaus , Zimmermann Ronan 

TITLE=Supervised Speaker Diarization Using Random Forests: A Tool for Psychotherapy Process Research

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01726

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01726

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Speaker diarization is the practice of determining who speaks when in audio recordings. Psychotherapy research often relies on labor intensive manual diarization. Unsupervised methods are available but yield higher error rates. We present a method for supervised speaker diarization based on random forests. It presents a compromise between commonly used labor-intensive manual coding and fully automated procedures. The method is validated using the EMRAI synthetic speech corpus with the goal to examine the feasibility of later use on naturalistic data and is made available. It yields low diarization error rates (M: 5.61%, STD: 2.19). Supervised speaker diarization is a promising method for psychotherapy research and similar fields.