Computer and Human Recognition of Regional Accents of British English

This paper is concerned with classification of the 14 regional accents of British English in the ABI (Accents of the British Isles) speech corpus. Results are reported using a state-of-theart Language Identification system, variants of Huckvale’s ACCDIST system, and human listeners. The best performance, 95.18% accuracy, is obtained using the textdependent ACCDIST measure. The performance of a conventional (text-independent) acoustic Language Identification system is poor, but is improved significantly (89.6% accuracy) by the addition of phone sequence information. Human performance (58.25% accuracy) is much lower than expected.

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