This paper discusses the formulation, development and analysis of a segment-based approach to the automatic language identification (LID) problem. This system utilizes phonotactic, acoustic-phonetic, and prosodic information within a unified probabilistic framework. The implementation of this framework allows the relative contributions of different sources of information to be determined empirically, as well as providing the mechanism for combining them within one system. The system has been evaluated using the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) multi-language telephone speech corpus and the results are competitive with other current LID systems. The results have also indicated that, while the phontotactic information of a spoken utterance is the most useful information for LID, acoustic-phonetic and prosodic information can be useful for increasing a system’s accuracy, especially when the utterance is short.

Topics
Speech communication, Phonetics, Phonology, Telecommunications engineering
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