Phonetic Temporal Neural Model for Language Identification

Deep neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great potential in language identification (LID). However, the phonetic information has been largely overlooked by most of existing neural LID methods, although this information has been used in the conventional phonetic LID systems with a great success. We present a phonetic temporal neural model for LID, which is an LSTM-RNN LID system but accepts phonetic features produced by a phone-discriminative DNN as the input, rather than raw acoustic features. This new model is a reminiscence of the old phonetic LID methods, but the phonetic knowledge here is much richer: it is at the frame level and involves compacted information of all phones. Our experiments conducted on the Babel database and the AP16-OLR database demonstrate that the temporal phonetic neural approach is very effective, and significantly outperforms existing acoustic neural models. It also outperforms the conventional i-vector approach on short utterances and in noisy conditions.