Using speech rhythm for acoustic language identification

This paper presents results on using rhythm for automatic language identification (LID). The idea is to explore the duration of pseudo-syllables as language discriminative feature. The resulting Rhythm system is based on Bigram duration models of neighbouring pseudo-syllables. The Rhythm system is fused with a Spectral system realized by parallel Phoneme Recognition (PPR) approach using MFCC’s. The LID systems were evaluated on a 7 languages identification task using the SpeechDat II databases. Tests were performed with 7 seconds utterances. Whereas the Spectral system acting as a baseline system achieved an error rate of 7.9 % the fused system reduced the error rate by 10 % relatively.