Language boundary detection and identification of mixed-language speech based on MAP estimation

The paper proposes a maximum a posteriori (MAP) based approach to segment and identify jointly an utterance with mixed languages. A statistical framework for language boundary detection and language identification is proposed. First, the MAP estimation is used to determine the boundary number and positions. Further, an LSA-based GMM and a VQ-based bigram language model are proposed to characterize a language and used for language identification. Finally, a likelihood ratio test approach is used to determine the optimal number of language boundaries. Experimental results show that the proposed approach exhibits encouraging potential in mixed-language segmentation and identification.