Prosody-based recognition of spoken German varieties

An approach to the recognition of regional language varieties is presented. The algorithm is tested on utterances of 3 to 6 seconds duration taken from large speech databases (SpeechDat) of Austrian and German German. The features are based only on the prosody of the speech and include parameters derived from the Fujisaki model and statistics of the fundamental frequency. Classification is performed using a multilayer perceptron and yields a rate of 64% correct. identification of the regional variety. Those results are then further evaluated for the use of a regional variety recognizer as a front-end of an automatic speech recognizer for different regional varieties. In case there is no a priori information of the distribution of the regional varieties spoken by the users, this approach yields a considerable improvement in the robustness of the speech recognition rates.