Language Recognition for Dialects and Closely Related Languages

This paper describes our development work to design a language recognition system that can discriminate closely related languages and dialects of the same language. The work was a joint effort by LIMSI and Vocapia Research in preparation for the NIST 2015 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE). The language recognition system results from a fusion of four core classifiers: a phonotactic component using DNN acoustic models, two purely acoustic components using a RNN model and i-vector model, and a lexical component. Each component generates language posterior probabilities optimized to maximize the LID NCE, making their combination simple and robust. The motivation for using multiple components representing different speech knowledge is that some dialect distinctions may not be manifest at the acoustic level. We report experiments on the NIST LRE15 data and provide an analysis of the results and some post-evaluation contrasts. The 2015 LRE task focused on the identification of 20 languages clustered in 6 groups (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Slavic and Iberic) of similar languages. Results are reported using the NIST Cavg metric which served as the primary metric for the OpenLRE15 evaluation. Results are also reported for the EER and the LER.

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