ASR-Aware End-to-End Neural Diarization

We present a Conformer-based end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) model that uses both acoustic input and features derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Two categories of features are explored: features derived directly from ASR output (phones, position-in-word and word boundaries) and features derived from a lexical speaker change detection model, trained by fine-tuning a pretrained BERT model on the ASR output. Three modifications to the Conformer-based EEND architecture are proposed to incorporate the features. First, ASR features are concatenated with acoustic features. Second, we propose a new attention mechanism called contextualized self-attention that utilizes ASR features to build robust speaker representations. Finally, multi-task learning is used to train the model to minimize classification loss for the ASR features along with diarization loss. Experiments on the two-speaker English conversations of Switchboard+SRE data sets show that multi-task learning with position-in-word information is the most effective way of utilizing ASR features, reducing the diarization error rate (DER) by 20% relative to the baseline.