Abstract: Language Identification (LI) is an important first step in several speech processing systems. With a growing number of voice-based assistants, speech LI has emerged as a widely researched field. To approach the problem of identifying languages, we can either adopt an implicit approach where only the speech for a language is present or an explicit one where text is available with its corresponding transcript. This paper focuses on an implicit approach due to the absence of transcriptive data. This paper benchmarks existing models and proposes a new attention based model for language identification which uses log-Mel spectrogram images as input. We also present the effectiveness of raw waveforms as features to neural network models for LI tasks. For training and evaluation of models, we classified six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian) with an accuracy of 95.4% and four languages (English, French, German, Spanish) with an accuracy of 96.3% obtained from the VoxForge dataset. This approach can further be scaled to incorporate more languages.

Introduction: Language Identification (LI) is a problem which involves classifying the language being spoken by a speaker. LI systems can be used in call centers to route international calls to an operator who is fluent in that identified language BIBREF0. In speech-based assistants, LI acts as the first step which chooses the corresponding grammar from a list of available languages for its further semantic analysis BIBREF1. It can also be used in multi-lingual voice-controlled information retrieval systems, for example, Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa. Over the years, studies have utilized many prosodic and acoustic features to construct machine learning models for LI systems BIBREF2. Every language is composed of phonemes, which are distinct unit of sounds in that language, such as b of black and g of green. Several prosodic and acoustic features are based on phonemes, which become the underlying features on whom the performance of the statistical model depends BIBREF3, BIBREF4. If two languages have many overlapping phonemes, then identifying them becomes a challenging task for a classifier. For example, the word cat in English, kat in Dutch, katze in German have different consonants but when used in a speech they all would sound quite similar. Due to such drawbacks several studies have switched over to using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to harness their novel auto-extraction techniques BIBREF1, BIBREF5. This work follows an implicit approach for identifying six languages with overlapping phonemes on the VoxForge BIBREF6 dataset and achieves 95.4% overall accuracy. In previous studies BIBREF1, BIBREF7, BIBREF5, authors use log-Mel spectrum of a raw audio as inputs to their models. One of our contributions is to enhance the performance of this approach by utilising recent techniques like Mixup augmentation of inputs and exploring the effectiveness of Attention mechanism in enhancing performance of neural network. As log-Mel spectrum needs to be computed for each raw audio input and processing time for generating log-Mel spectrum increases linearly with length of audio, this acts as a bottleneck for these models. Hence, we propose the use of raw audio waveforms as inputs to deep neural network which boosts performance by avoiding additional overhead of computing log-Mel spectrum for each audio. Our 1D-ConvNet architecture auto-extracts and classifies features from this raw audio input. The structure of the work is as follows. In Section 2 we discuss about the previous related studies in this field. The model architecture for both the raw waveforms and log-Mel spectrogram images is discussed in Section 3 along with the a discussion on hyperparameter space exploration. In Section 4 we present the experimental results. Finally, in Section 5 we discuss the conclusions drawn from the experiment and future work.

Question: What is the accuracy reported by state-of-the-art methods?
Answer: Answer with content missing: (Table 1)
Previous state-of-the art on same dataset: ResNet50 89% (6 languages), SVM-HMM 70% (4 languages)