iVector-based prosodic system for language identification

Prosody is the part of speech where rhythm, stress, and intonation are reflected. In language identification tasks, these characteristics are assumed to be language dependent, and thus the language can be identified from them. In this paper, an automatic language recognition system that extracts prosody information from speech and makes decisions about the language with a generative classifier based on iVectors is built. The system is tested on the NIST LRE09 dataset. The results are still not comparable to state-of-the-art acoustic and phonotactic systems. However, they are promising and the fusion of the new approach with an iVector-based acoustic system is found to bring further improvements over the latter.