Language Identification: A Tutorial

Abstract

This tutorial presents an overview of the progression of spoken language identification (LID) systems and current developments. The introduction provides a background on automatic language identification systems using syntactic, morphological, and in particular, acoustic, phonetic, phonotactic and prosodic level information. Different frontend features that are used in LID systems are presented. Several normalization and language modelling techniques have also been presented. We also discuss different LID system architectures that embrace a variety of front-ends and back-ends, and configurations such as hierarchical and fusion classifiers. Evaluations of the LID system are presented using NIST language recognition evaluation tasks.