ISCA Archive Odyssey 2014
ISCA Archive Odyssey 2014

Swiss French Regional Accent Identification

Alexandros Lazaridis, Elie Khoury, Jean-Philippe Goldman, Mathieu Avanzi, Sébastien Marcel, Philip N. Garner

In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize the speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four different regions of Switzerland, i.e. Geneva (GE), Martigny (MA), Neuchˆatel (NE) and Nyon (NY). To achieve this goal, we rely on a generative probabilistic framework for classification based on Gaussian mixture modelling (GMM). Two different GMM-based algorithms are investigated: (1) the baseline technique of universal background modelling (UBM) followed by maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) adaptation, and (2) total variability (i-vector) modelling. Both systems perform well, with the i-vector-based system outperforming the baseline system, achieving a relative improvement of 15.3% in the overall regional accent identification accuracy.