CONF Lazaridis_ODYSSEY_2014/IDIAP SWISS FRENCH REGIONAL ACCENT IDENTIFICATION Lazaridis, Alexandros Khoury, Elie Goldman, Jean-Philippe Avanzi, Mathieu Marcel, Sébastien Garner, Philip N. Accent Identification French Regional Accents GMM Modelling i-vectors SVM EXTERNAL http://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2014/Lazaridis_ODYSSEY_2014.pdf PUBLIC Odyssey: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop 2014 In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize the speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four different regions of Switzerland, i.e. Geneva (GE), Martigny (MA), Neuchˆatel (NE) and Nyon (NY). To achieve this goal, we rely on a generative probabilistic framework for classification based on Gaussian mixture modelling (GMM). Two different GMM-based algorithms are investigated: (1) the baseline technique of universal background modelling (UBM) followed by maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) adaptation, and (2) total variability (i-vector) modelling. Both systems perform well, with the i-vector-based system outperforming the baseline system, achieving a relative improvement of 17.1% in the overall regional accent identification accuracy.