INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Linguistically-Motivated Automatic Classification of Regional French Varieties

Cécile Woehrling, Philippe Boula de Mareüil, Martine Adda-Decker

LIMSI, France

The goal of this study is to automatically differentiate French varieties (standard French and French varieties spoken in the South of France, Alsace, Belgium and Switzerland) by applying a linguistically-motivated approach. We took advantage of automatic phoneme alignment to measure vowel formants, consonant (de)voicing, pronunciation variants as well as prosodic cues. These features were then used to identify French varieties by applying classification techniques. On large corpora of hundreds of speakers, over 80% correct identification scores were obtained. The confusions between varieties and the features used (by decision trees) are linguistically grounded.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Woehrling, Cécile / Mareüil, Philippe Boula de / Adda-Decker, Martine (2009): "Linguistically-motivated automatic classification of regional French varieties", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 2183-2186.