Language Identification Using Phonetic and Prosodic HMMs with Feature Normalization
Y. Obuchi, N. Sato · 2006
Phonetics and prosody are two important factors in automatic language identification. Prosodic HMMs enable language identification systems to use prosodic information in a similar manner to phonetic HMMs. The paper describes how to create prosodic HMMs and implement them in language identification systems. Linear discriminant analysis of the likelihood and N-gram scores of prosodic segment recognition realizes fast and reliable language identification. Moreover, combining prosodic HMMs with phonetic HMMs improves system performance. In this framework, feature normalization techniques that were originally developed for robust speech recognition can be applied to phonetic and prosodic features. Language identification accuracy increases using these techniques in clean and noisy environments.