Dravidian language classification from speech signal using spectral and prosodic features

The interesting aspect of the Dravidian languages is a commonality through a shared script, similar vocabulary, and their common root language. In this work, an attempt has been made to classify the four complex Dravidian languages using cepstral coefficients and prosodic features. The speech of Dravidian languages has been recorded in various environments and considered as a database. It is demonstrated that while cepstral coefficients can indeed identify the language correctly with a fair degree of accuracy, prosodic features are added to the cepstral coefficients to improve language identification performance. Legendre polynomial fitting and the principle component analysis (PCA) are applied on feature vectors to reduce dimensionality which further resolves the issue of time complexity. In the experiments conducted, it is found that using both cepstral coefficients and prosodic features, a language identification rate of around 87% is obtained, which is about 18% above the baseline system using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). It is observed from the results that the temporal variations and prosody are the important factors needed to be considered for the tasks of language identification. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.