Towards Unsupervised Speaker Diarization System for Multilingual Telephone Calls Using Pre-trained Whisper Model and Mixture of Sparse Autoencoders

Existing speaker diarization systems typically rely on large amounts of manually annotated data, which is labor-intensive and difficult to obtain, especially in real-world scenarios. Additionally, language-specific constraints in these systems significantly hinder their effectiveness and scalability in multilingual settings. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based speaker diarization system designed for multilingual telephone call applications. Our proposed system supports multiple languages and eliminates the need for large-scale annotated data during training by utilizing the multilingual Whisper model to extract speaker embeddings. Furthermore, we introduce a network architecture called Mixture of Sparse Autoencoders (Mix-SAE) for unsupervised speaker clustering. Experimental results on the evaluation dataset derived from two-speaker subsets of benchmark CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND telephonic speech corpora demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed Mix-SAE network to other autoencoder-based clustering methods. The overall performance of our proposed system also highlights the promising potential for developing unsupervised, multilingual speaker diarization systems within the context of limited annotated data. It also indicates the system’s capability for integration into multi-task speech analysis applications based on general-purpose models such as those that combine speech-to-text, language detection, and speaker diarization.