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Spoken Language Identification Using ConvNets (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Oct 12, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It turns speech into picture-like frequency charts and uses a pattern-spotting network with attention to guess which language is spoken, needing no written transcript. On six languages it guessed right 95.4% of the time, working from sound alone where the usual setup needs text.

Abstract · Spoken Language Identification using ConvNets

Language Identification (LI) is an important first step in several speech processing systems. With a growing number of voice-based assistants, speech LI has emerged as a widely researched field. To approach the problem of identifying languages, we can either adopt an implicit approach where only the speech for a language is present or an explicit one where text is available with its corresponding transcript. This paper focuses on an implicit approach due to the absence of transcriptive data. This paper benchmarks existing models and proposes a new attention based model for language identification which uses log-Mel spectrogram images as input. We also present the effectiveness of raw waveforms as features to neural network models for LI tasks. For training and evaluation of models, we classified six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian) with an accuracy of 95.4% and four languages (English, French, German, Spanish) with an accuracy of 96.3% obtained from the VoxForge dataset. This approach can further be scaled to incorporate more languages.

Sarthak, Shikhar Shukla, Govind Mittal
arXiv:1910.04269 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Oct 9, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 2019 European Conference on Ambient Intelligence

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