The purpose of Language Identification (LID) is to identify a specific language from a spoken utterance, automatically. Language-specific characteristics are always associated with different languages. Most existing LID approaches utilise a statistical modelling process with common acoustic/phonotactic features to model specific languages while avoiding any language-specific knowledge. Great successes have been achieved in this area over past decades. However, there is still a huge gap between these languageindependent methods and the actual language-specific patterns. It is extremely useful to address these specific acoustic or semantic construction patterns, without spending huge labour on annotation which requires language-specific knowledge. Inspired by this goal, this research focuses on the language-feature dependency. Several practical methods have been proposed. Various features and modelling techniques have been studied in this research. Some of them carry out additional language-specific information without manual labelling, such as a novel duration modelling method based on articulatory features, and a novel Frequency-Modulation (FM) based feature. The performance of each individual feature is studied for each of the language-pair combinations. The similarity between languages and the contribution in identifying a language by using a particular feature are defined for the first time, in a quantitative style. These distance measures and languagedependent contributions become the foundations of the later-presented frameworks ?? language-dependent weighting and hierarchical language identification. The latter particularly provides remarkable flexibility and enhancement when identifying a relatively large number of languages and accents, due to the fact that the most discriminative feature or feature-combination is used when separating each of the languages. The proposed systems are evaluated in various corpora and task contexts including NIST language recognition evaluation tasks. The performances have been improved in various degrees. The key techniques developed for this work have also been applied to solve a different problem other than LID ?? speech-based cognitive load monitoring.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258743 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Yin, Bo, Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded By:University of New South Wales. Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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