INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Computer and Human Recognition of Regional Accents of British English

Abualsoud Hanani, Martin Russell, Michael J. Carey

University of Birmingham, UK

This paper is concerned with classification of the 14 regional accents of British English in the ABI (Accents of the British Isles) speech corpus. Results are reported using a state-of-the-art Language Identification system, variants of Huckvale's ACCDIST system, and human listeners. The best performance, 95.18% accuracy, is obtained using the text-dependent ACCDIST measure. The performance of a conventional (text-independent) acoustic Language Identification system is poor, but is improved significantly (89.6% accuracy) by the addition of phone sequence information. Human performance (58.25% accuracy) is much lower than expected.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hanani, Abualsoud / Russell, Martin / Carey, Michael J. (2011): "Computer and human recognition of regional accents of british English", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 729-732.