Discriminative training of Gaussian mixture bigram models with application to Chinese dialect identification

This study focuses on the parametric stochastic modeling of characteristic sound features that distinguish languages from one another. A new stochastic model, the so-called Gaussian mixture bigram model (GMBM), that allows exploitation of the acoustic feature bigram statistics without requiring transcribed training data is introduced. For greater efficiency, a minimum classification error (MCE) algorithm is employed to accomplish discriminative training of a GMBM-based Chinese dialect identification system. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the GMBM for dialect-specific acoustic modeling, and use of this model allows the proposed system to distinguish between the three major Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan with 94.4% accuracy.