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Forensic speaker comparison

Definition

A systematic examination comparing acoustic and phonetic features of a questioned voice recording against known reference recordings of a named individual, expressed in probabilistic or likelihood-ratio terms, not as a categorical identity statement.

Related terms

Formant frequencies
Resonance frequencies of the vocal tract that shape vowel quality. F1 and F2 (the first and second formants) are the most informative...
I-vector / x-vector
Fixed-length mathematical representations of a speech utterance used in automatic speaker recognition. I-vectors are derived from Gaussian mixture model statistics; x-vectors are...
IAFPA
International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics: the primary professional body for forensic phoneticians and audio analysts, which publishes guidelines on speaker...
Likelihood ratio (LR)
The ratio of two conditional probabilities: the probability of the observed evidence given the prosecution's hypothesis (same source), divided by the probability...
PLDA (Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis)
A statistical back-end model used with i-vector and x-vector systems to compute a similarity score between two utterance representations, normalised for within-speaker...

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