ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005

Constructing family trees of multilingual speech using Gaussian mixture models

Shuichi Itahashi, Shiwei Zhu, Mikio Yamamoto

This paper proposes a method for automatically clustering multilingual speech so as to derive language family trees. We consider that the language is the source of information which generates speech feature parameters; the probability or statistical characteristics of this information is modeled by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs); then a distance measure between the GMMs is introduced. Based on this, we construct family trees of multilingual speech which are quite similar to those considered in linguistics.