Advances in phone-based modeling for automatic accent classification

It is suggested that algorithms capable of estimating and characterizing accent knowledge would provide valuable information in the development of more effective speech systems such as speech recognition, speaker identification, audio stream tagging in spoken document retrieval, channel monitoring, or voice conversion. Accent knowledge could be used for selection of alternative pronunciations in a lexicon, engage adaptation for acoustic modeling, or provide information for biasing a language model in large vocabulary speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a text-independent automatic accent classification system using phone-based models. Algorithm formulation begins with a series of experiments focused on capturing the spectral evolution information as potential accent sensitive cues. Alternative subspace representations using principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis with projected trajectories are considered. Finally, an experimental study is performed to compare the spectral trajectory model framework to a traditional hidden Markov model recognition framework using an accent sensitive word corpus. System evaluation is performed using a corpus representing five English speaker groups with native American English, and English spoken with Mandarin Chinese, French, Thai, and Turkish accents for both male and female speakers.