Integration of evolutionary computation algorithms and new AUTO-TLBO technique in the speaker clustering stage for speaker diarization of broadcast news

Abstract The task of speaker diarization is to answer the question "who spoke when?" In this paper, we present different clustering approaches which consist of Evolutionary Computation Algorithms (ECAs) such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, and Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm as well as Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) technique as a new optimization technique at the aim to optimize the number of clusters in the speaker clustering stage which remains a challenging problem. Clustering validity indexes, such as Within-Class Distance (WCD) index, Davies and Bouldin (DB) index, and Contemporary Document (CD) index, is also used in order to make a correction for each possible grouping of speakers' segments. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on News Broadcast database (NDTV), and their performance comparisons are made between each another as well as with some well-known clustering algorithms. Results show the superiority of the new AUTO-TLBO technique in terms of comparative results obtained on NDTV, RT-04F, and ESTER datasets of News Broadcast