Spoken language identification using large vocabulary speech recognition

A task independent spoken language identification (LID) system which uses a large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (LVASR) module for each language to choose the most likely language spoken is described in detail. The system has been trained on 5 languages: English, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is demonstrated that the performance of a LID system which is based on LVASR gives very good performance, when trained and tested on a 5 language subset (English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese) of the Oregon Graduate Institute language data base. The performance advantage is shown for both long (50 second) and short (10 second) test utterances. The five language results show 88% correct recognition for 50 second utterances without confidence measures and 98% correct with confidence measures. The recognition rate is 81% correct for 10 second utterances without confidence measures and 93% correct with confidence measures. The best performance has been obtained for systems trained on phonetically hand labeled speech