Lexical Speaker Error Correction: Leveraging Language Models for Speaker
  Diarization Error Correction
Rohit Paturi Sundararajan Srinivasan Xiang Li
Speaker diarization (SD) is typically used with an automatic speech
recognition (ASR) system to ascribe speaker labels to recognized words. The
conventional approach reconciles outputs from independently optimized ASR and
SD systems, where the SD system typically uses only acoustic information to
identify the speakers in the audio stream. This approach can lead to speaker
errors especially around speaker turns and regions of speaker overlap. In this
paper, we propose a novel second-pass speaker error correction system using
lexical information, leveraging the power of modern language models (LMs). Our
experiments across multiple telephony datasets show that our approach is both
effective and robust. Training and tuning only on the Fisher dataset, this
error correction approach leads to relative word-level diarization error rate
(WDER) reductions of 15-30% on three telephony datasets: RT03-CTS, Callhome
American English and held-out portions of Fisher.