Spoken language identification using large vocabulary speech recognition

A task independent spoken Language Identi cation (LID) system which uses a Large Vocabulary Automatic Speech Recognition (LVASR) module for each language to choose the most likely language spoken is described in detail. The system has been trained on 5 languages: English, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. In this paper it is demonstrated that the performance of a LID system which is based on LVASR gives very good performance, when trained and tested on a 5 language subset (English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese) of the Oregon Graduate Institute 11 language data base. The performance advantage is shown for both long (50 second) and short (10 second) test utterances. The ve language results show 88% correct recognition for 50 second utterances without con dence measures and 98 % correct with con dence measures. The recognition rate is 81 % correct for 10 second utterances without con dence measures and 93 % correct with con dence measures. The best performance has been obtained for systems trained on phonetically hand labeled speech.