Language identification with phonological and lexical models

Abstract

A task independent spoken language identification (LID) system which uses phonological and lexical models to distinguish languages is described. We demonstrate that the performance of an LID system which is based only on acoustic models can be improved by incorporating higher level linguistic knowledge in the form of trigram phonemotatics and lexical matching. We also present the performance of our LID system for four languages (English, German, Mandarin and Spanish).