Nkululeko Workflow

Nkululeko is a framework to build machine learning models that recognize speaker characteristics on a very high level of abstraction (i.e. starting without programming experience).

This post is meant to help you with setting up your first experiment, based on the Berlin Emodb.

  1. Set up Python

It’s written in python, so first you have to set up a Python environment. It is recommended to use Linux-based systems for easiness, but it should work on Windows as well. Python is pre-installed on most Linux systems, but you might want to install a virtual environment to keep your system clean. The current version of nkululeko is tested with Python 3.9.

  1. Install Nkululeko

Inside your virtual environment, run:

pip install nkululeko

This should install nkululeko and all required modules. It takes a long time and a lot of space, when done initially.

  1. Get a database

Load the Berlin emodb database to some location on you harddrive, as discussed in this post. I will refer to the location as “emodb root” from now on. You can also follow Hello World page.

  1. Adapt the INI file

Use your favourite editor, e.g., Visual Studio code and edit the file that defines your experiment. You might start with this demo sample. You can find more templates to start here and an overview on all the options you can set here

Put the emodb root folder as the emodb value, for me this looks like this:

emodb = /home/felix/data/audb/emodb

An overview on all nkululeko options is listed in INI file.

  1. Run the experiment

Inside a shell type (or use VSCode) and start the process with:

python -m nkululeko.nkululeko --config exp_emodb.ini

  1. Inspect the results

If all goes well, the program should start by extracting opensmile features, and, if you’re done, you should be able to inspect the results in the folder named like the experiment: exp_emodb. There should be a subfolder with a confusion matrix named images and a subfolder for the textual results named results.

You can find INI files for different use cases in tutorials documentation in the examples folder of the nkululeko repository.