Comparative Study of Several Phonotactic-Based Approaches to Spanish-Basque Language Identification

This paper presents a series of language identification (LID) experiments for Spanish and Basque. Spanish and Basque are both official languages in the Basque Country, a region located in northern Spain. We focused our research on studying several phonotactic-based methodologies, comparing both the performance of phonotactic models trained from text and audio samples and the use of phone and phone-sequences as decoding units. The results show that whereas the use of audio-based phonotactic models performs better than the text ones, when using task-specific information it is also possible to achieve great accuracies. The use of phone sequences as decoding units appears to be useful when constraining the phone decoders to those sequences.