The inference of identity in forensic speaker recognition

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways of interpreting evidence within the ®eld of speaker recognition. Several methods ± speaker veri®cation, speaker identi®cation 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 scienti®c 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 ®lls 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 identi®cation evidences. Ó 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.