c ? 2008 Association for Computational Linguistics Dialect Classification for online podcasts fusing Acoustic and Language based Structural and Semantic Information Rahul Chitturi , John . H.L . Hansen1 Center for Robust Speech Systems ( CRSS ) Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas Richardson , Texas 75080 , U.S.A { rahul.ch @ student , john.hansen @ } utdallas.edu Abstract The variation in speech due to dialect is a factor which significantly impacts speech system per-formance .