Publications

In this paper, we demonstrate how informative dialect recognition systems such as acoustic pronunciation model (APM) help speech scientists locate and analyze phonetic rules efficiently. In particular, we analyze dialect-specific characteristics automatically learned from APM across two American English dialects. We show that unsupervised rule retrieval performs similarly to supervised...

In this paper, we extend our previous analysis of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) subspace compensation techniques using Gaussian modeling in the supervector space combined with additive channel and observation noise. We show that under the modeling assumptions of a total-variability i-vector system, full Gaussian supervector scoring can also be performed...

This paper presents a description of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MITLL) language recognition system developed for the NIST 2011 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE). The submitted system consisted of a fusion of four core classifiers, three based on spectral similarity and one based on tokenization. Additional system improvements were achieved following...

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the...

We propose an informative dialect recognition system that learns phonetic transformation rules, and uses them to identify dialects. A hidden Markov model is used to align reference phones with dialect specific pronunciations to characterize when and how often substitutions, insertions, and deletions occur. Decision tree clustering is used to find...

Varying channel conditions present a difficult problem for many speech technologies such as language identification (LID). Channel compensation techniques have been shown to significantly improve performance in LID for acoustic systems. For high-level token systems, nuisance attribute projection (NAP) has been shown to perform well in the context of speaker...

We propose supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to extract dialect discriminating phonetic rules and use these rules to adapt biphones to identify dialects. Despite many challenges (e.g., sub-dialect issues and no word transcriptions), we discovered dialect discriminating biphones compatible with the linguistic literature, while outperforming a baseline monophone system by...

Dialect recognition is a challenging and multifaceted problem. Distinguishing between dialects can rely upon many tiers of interpretation of speech data - e.g., prosodic, phonetic, spectral, and word. High-accuracy automatic methods for dialect recognition typically rely upon either phonetic or spectral characteristics of the input. A challenge with spectral system...

Software-defined cognitive radios (CRs) use voice as a primary input/output (I/O) modality and are expected to have substantial computational resources capable of supporting advanced speech- and audio-processing applications. This chapter extends previous work on speech applications (e.g., [1]) to cognitive services that enhance military mission capability by capitalizing on automatic...

Automatic recognition systems are commonly used in speech processing to classify observed utterances by the speaker's identity, dialect, and language. These problems often require high processing throughput, especially in applications involving multiple concurrent incoming speech streams, such as in datacenter-level processing. Recent advances in processor technology allow multiple processors to...