Analysis and modeling of acoustic information for automatic dialect classification

A primary challenge in the field of automatic speech recognition is to understand and create acoustic models to represent individual differences in their spoken language. Individual’s age, gender; their speaking styles influenced by their dialect may be few of the reasons for these differences. This work investigates the dialectal differences by measuring the analysis of variance of acoustic features such as, formant frequencies, pitch, pitch slope, duration and intensity for vowel sounds. This paper attempts to discuss methods to capture dialect specific knowledge through vocal tract and prosody information extracted from speech that can be utilized for automatic identification of dialects. Kernel based support vector machine is utilized for measuring the dialect discriminating ability of acoustic features. For the spectral feature shifted delta cepstral coefficients along with Mel frequency cepstral coefficients gives a recognition performance of 66.97 %. Combination of prosodic features performs better with a classification score of 74 %. The model is further evaluated for the combination of spectral and prosodic feature set and achieves a classification accuracy of 88.77 %. The proposed model is compared with the human perception of dialects. The overall work is based on four dialects of Hindi; one of the world’s major languages.