The inference of identity in forensic speaker recognition

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways of interpreting evidence within the field of speaker recognition. Several methods - speaker verification, speaker identification and type I and type II errors statement - will be presented and evaluated in the light of judicial needs. It will be shown that these methods for interpreting evidence unfortunately force the scientist to adopt a role and to formulate answers that are outside his scientific province. A Bayesian interpretation framework (based on the likelihood ratio) will be proposed. It represents an adequate solution for the interpretation of the aforementioned evidence in the judicial process. It fills in the majority of the gaps of the other inference frameworks and allows likening the speaker recognition to the same logic than the other forensic identification evidences. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.