Publications

Language recognition is typically performed with methods that exploit phonotactics--a phone recognition language modeling (PRLM) system. A PRLM system converts speech to a lattice of phones and then scores a language model. A standard extension to this scheme is to use multiple parallel phone recognizers (PPRLM). In this paper, we...

Automatic language recognition from speech consists of algorithms and techniques that model and classify the language being spoken. Current state-of-the-art language recognition systems fall into two broad categories: spectral- and token-sequence-based approaches. In this chapter, we describe algorithms for extracting features and models representing these types of language cues and...

This paper presents a description of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory submissions to the 2005 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE05). As was true in 2003, the 2005 submissions were combinations of core cepstral and phonotactic recognizers whose outputs were fused to generate final scores. For the 2005 evaluation, Lincoln Laboratory had...

In this paper we describe experiments conducted during the development of a lattice-based PPRLM language identification system as part of the NIST 2005 language recognition evaluation campaign. In experiments following LRE05 the PPRLM-lattice sub-system presented here achieved a 30s/primary condition EER of 4.87%, making it the single best performing recognizer...

Support vector machines (SVMs) have proven to be a powerful technique for pattern classification. SVMs map inputs into a high-dimensional space and then separate classes with a hyperplane. A critical aspect of using SVMs successfully is the design of the inner product, the kernel, induced by the high dimensional mapping...

A dysphonia, or disorder of the mechanisms of phonation in the larynx, can create time-varying amplitude fluctuations in the voice. A model for band-dependent analysis of this amplitude modulation (AM) phenomenon in dysphonic speech is developed from a traditional communications engineering perspective. This perspective challenges current dysphonia analysis methods that...

Recent results in the area of language identification have shown a significant improvement over previous systems. In this paper, we evaluate the related problem of dialect identification using one of the techniques recently developed for language identification, the Gaussian mixture models with shifted-delta-cepstral features. The system shown is developed using...

Support vector machines (SVMs) have become a popular tool for discriminative classification. Powerful theoretical and computational tools for support vector machines have enabled significant improvements in pattern classification in several areas. An exciting area of recent application of support vector machines is in speech processing. A key aspect of applying...

Formal evaluations conducted by NIST in 1996 demonstrated that systems that used parallel banks of tokenizer-dependent language models produced the best language identification performance. Since that time, other approaches to language identification have been developed that match or surpass the performance of phone-based systems. This paper describes and evaluates three...

Published results indicate that automatic language identification (LID) systems that rely on multiple-language phone recognition and n-gram language modeling produce the best performance in formal LID evaluations. By contrast, Gaussian mixture model (GMM) systems, which measure acoustic characteristics, are far more efficient computationally but have tended to provide inferior levels...