Continuous speech separation (CSS) is an approach to handling overlapped speech in conversational audio signals. Most previous speech separation algorithms were tested on artificially mixed pre-segmented speech signals and thus bypassed overlap detection and speaker counting by implicitly assuming overlapped regions to be already extracted from the input audio. CSS is an attempt to directly process the continuously incoming audio signals with online processing. The main concept was established and its effectiveness was evaluated on real meeting recordings in [1]. As these recordings were proprietary, a publicly available dataset, called LibriCSS, has been prepared by the same research group in [2]. This repository contains the programs for LibriCSS evaluation.
[1] T. Yoshioka et al., "Advances in Online Audio-Visual Meeting Transcription," 2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), SG, Singapore, 2019, pp. 276-283.
[2] Z. Chen et al., "Continuous speech separation: dataset and analysis," ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, 2020, accepted for publication.
We use SCTK (https://github.com/usnistgov/SCTK), the NIST Scoring Toolkit, for evaluation and PyKaldi2 (https://github.com/jzlianglu/pykaldi2), a Python internface to Kaldi for ASR. They can be installed as follows.
./install.sh
source ./path.sh
The second command defines some environmental variables, where path.sh is created by running install.sh.
We also use some Python packages. Assuming you are using conda, the simplest way to install all required dependencies is to reate a conda environment as follows.
conda env create -f conda_env.yml
conda activate libricss_release
The second command activates the newly created environment named libricss_release.
The following script executes all steps, including data preparation, ASR, and evaluation.
./run_all.sh
At this moment, this is not included in the released version of this repository. This will be updated soon.
Alternatively, you may run each step separately, which would be useful when you don't want to use the default ASR system.
- First, the data can be downloaded and preprocessed as follows.
cd dataprep ./scripts/dataprep.sh - Then, ASR can be run as
<ASR command> - Finally, the ASR results can be scored as follows.
This performs evaluation for the sample CTM files provided under "sample" directory, which correspond to the "no separation" results of Table 2 in [2]. The last Python script, scoring/python/report.py, will print out the results as follows.
cd scoring ./scripts/eval_continuous.sh ../sample python ./python/report.py --inputdir ../sampleResult Summary -------------- Condition: %WER 0S : 15.5 0L : 11.5 10 : 21.9 20 : 27.1 30 : 34.7 40 : 40.8
NOTE: WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU USE dataprep/scripts/dataprep.sh MENTIONED ABOVE TO OBTAIN THE DATA.
LibriCSS consists of distant microphone recordings of concatenated LibriSpeech utterances played back from loudspeakers in an office room, which enables evaluation of speech separation algorithms that handle long form audio. See [2] for details of the data. The data can be downloaded at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Piioxd5G_85K9Bhcr8ebdhXx0CnaHy7l/view. The archive file contains only the original "mini-session" recordings (see Section 3.1 of [2]) as well as the source signals played back from the loudspeakers. By following the instruction described in the README file, you should be able to generate the data for both utterance-wise evaluation (see Section 3.3.2 of [2]) and continuous input evaluation (Section 3.3.3 of [2]).
The original directory structure is different from that the ASR/scoring tools expect. Python script dataprep/python/dataprep.py reorganizes the recordings. To see how it can be used, refer to dataprep/scripts/dataprep.sh (which executes all the necessary steps to start experiments).
As a result of the data preparation step, the 7-ch and 1-ch test data are created by default under $EXPROOT/7ch and $EXPROOT/monaural, respectively (EXPROOT is defined in path.sh). These directories consist of subdirectories named overlap_ratio_*_sil*_*_session*_actual*, each containing chunked mini-session audio files segment_*.wav (see Section 3.3.3 of [2]).
The task is to trascribe each file and save the result in the CTM format as segment_*.ctm. Refer to http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ece5527/sctk-2.3-rc1/doc/infmts.htm#ctm_fmt_name_0 for the CTM format specification. The result directory has to retain the original subdirectory structure, as in the "sample" directory. Then, your ASR CTM files can be evaluated with scoring/scripts/eval_continuous.sh.