Paper ID: 2306.09979

Evaluation of Speech Representations for MOS prediction

Frederico S. Oliveira, Edresson Casanova, Arnaldo Cândido Júnior, Lucas R. S. Gris, Anderson S. Soares, Arlindo R. Galvão Filho

In this paper, we evaluate feature extraction models for predicting speech quality. We also propose a model architecture to compare embeddings of supervised learning and self-supervised learning models with embeddings of speaker verification models to predict the metric MOS. Our experiments were performed on the VCC2018 dataset and a Brazilian-Portuguese dataset called BRSpeechMOS, which was created for this work. The results show that the Whisper model is appropriate in all scenarios: with both the VCC2018 and BRSpeech- MOS datasets. Among the supervised and self-supervised learning models using BRSpeechMOS, Whisper-Small achieved the best linear correlation of 0.6980, and the speaker verification model, SpeakerNet, had linear correlation of 0.6963. Using VCC2018, the best supervised and self-supervised learning model, Whisper-Large, achieved linear correlation of 0.7274, and the best model speaker verification, TitaNet, achieved a linear correlation of 0.6933. Although the results of the speaker verification models are slightly lower, the SpeakerNet model has only 5M parameters, making it suitable for real-time applications, and the TitaNet model produces an embedding of size 192, the smallest among all the evaluated models. The experiment results are reproducible with publicly available source-code1 .

Submitted: Jun 16, 2023