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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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This paper deals with the automatic discrimination of Arabic
dialects. We focus on the relevancy of the vowel system
scattering as a cue for Western vs. Middle-Eastern distinction of
Arabic dialects. The former group indeed is characterized by a
centralized distribution of the short vocalic segments although
the latter favors a peripherical scattering. These two types of
distribution in the acoustic space allowed us to consider this
phonetic criterion as reliable for the discrimination of dialectal
varieties in Arabic.
The experiments are based on an automatic vowel detection
algorithm and a statistical vowel system modeling. Experiments
are performed using utterances recorded from a score of Arabic
speakers of various geographical origin. Results show that
Western dialects and Middle-Eastern dialects may be
discriminated using cepstral features combined with a vowel
duration cue since the rate of correct identification reaches 78 %.
Bibliographic reference. Pellegrino, François / Barkat, Melissa (1999): "Investigating dialectal differences via vowel system modeling: application to Arabic", In ICPhS-14, 145-148.