1996 Speaker Recognition Benchmark

The 1998 speaker recognition evaluation is part of an ongoing series of yearly benchmark tests conducted by NIST. These tests are intended to provide a stable reference point for measuring and comparing the performance of diverse methods for text-independent speaker recognition over the telephone and should be of interest to all researchers working in this area of speech technology development. The test sets and evaluation protocols have been designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported and to be accessible.

In 1996 and 1997 handset variation was featured as a prominent technical challenge to be addressed. While handset variation remains a formidable challenge, the 1998 evaluation directs greatest attention toward speaker recognition performance for the case in which both training and test data are from the same source. The speech data were recorded by the LDC between January and March 1997 most of the speakers recruited for this collection were college students from the Great Lakes (Northern Midwest) region of the U.S.