Variability in speech due to dialect is a major factor limiting speech system performance for speech recognition, spoken document retrieval, and dialog systems. In this study, we propose a novel discriminative algorithm to improve dialect classification for unsupervised spontaneous speech in Arabic. No transcripts are used for either training or testing, and all data are spontaneous speech. The...

Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) estimation is one of two developments in econometrics in the 80ies that revolutionized empirical work in macroeconomics. (The other being the understanding of unit roots and cointegration.) The path breaking articles on GMM were those of Hansen (1982) and Hansen and Singleton (1982). For introductions to GMM, Davidson and MacKinnon (1993) have comprehensive ch...

The GMM (generalized min-max) kernel was recently proposed [5] as a measure of data similarity and was demonstrated effective in machine learning tasks. In order to use the GMM kernel for large-scale datasets, the prior work resorted to the (generalized) consistent weighted sampling (GCWS) to convert the GMM kernel to linear kernel. We call this approach as “GMM-GCWS”. In the machine learning l...