ISCA Archive Odyssey 2010
ISCA Archive Odyssey 2010

The 2009 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation

Alvin Martin, Craig Greenberg

This paper reviews the 2009 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE09), the most recent in a series held since 1996, which have evaluated automatic systems for language recognition. The 2009 evaluation was notable for including a larger number of target and non-target languages, for primarily utilizing "found" narrowband conversational broadcast data from the Voice of America, and for including a language pairs test condition that included examination of performance at distinguishing several particularly interesting and confusable pairs of languages. Overall, the broadcast data proved roughly comparable in difficulty with the type of collected conversational telephone date utilized previously. Improvement was seen in best system performance levels for some test conditions.