Flemish accent identification based on formant and duration features

In this paper, we describe a method to identify Flemish accents and examine the contribution of different features. Although Flanders is quite small, we found that, even when speakers are asked to read a text in standard Dutch, regional accents are still present in the speech. Our method uses formant and phoneme duration features in a text-dependent model. A relevant set of features is automatically selected and normalized in a way reminiscent of the eigenvoices approach for speaker adaptation. We found good discrimination results between the accent of Antwerp and Brabant versus the accents of other provinces. However, the confusion between the accent of Limburg versus the accent of East- and West-Flanders shows that the feature set is too restricted,