Automatic Accent and Gender Recognition of Regional UK Speakers

C. Jayne, V. Chang, J. Bailey, Q.A. Xu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

With the ubiquity of voice assistants across the UK and the world, speech recognition of the regional accents across the British Isles has proven challenging due to varying pronunciations. This paper proposes an automated recognition of the geographical origin and gender of a voice sample based on the six regional dialects of the United Kingdom. Twenty six features are extracted from 17,877 voice samples and then used to design, implement and evaluate machine learning classifiers based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithms. The results suggest that the proposed approach could be applicable for areas such as e-commerce and the service industry, and it provides a contribution to NLP audio research.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEngineering Applications of Neural Networks - 23rd International Conference, EAAAI/EANN 2022, Proceedings
EditorsLazaros Iliadis, Chrisina Jayne, Anastasios Tefas, Elias Pimenidis
PublisherSpringer
Pages67-80
Number of pages14
Edition1
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-031-08223-8
ISBN (Print)9783031082221
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jun 2022

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume1600 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929
ISSN (Electronic)1865-0937

Keywords

  • Accent classification
  • Artificial neural networks
  • Deep learning
  • Speech recognition

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