Spoken Language Identification System Using Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract

Following recent advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence, spoken language identification applications are playing an increasingly significant role in our day-to-day lives, especially in the domain of multi-lingual speech recognition. In this article, we propose a spoken language identification system that depends on the sequence of feature vectors. The proposed system uses a hybrid Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), which combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) network, for spoken language identification on seven languages, including Arabic, chosen from subsets of the Mozilla Common Voice (MCV) corpus. The proposed system exploits the advantages of both CNN and RNN architectures to construct the CRNN architecture. At the feature extraction stage, it compares the Gammatone Cepstral Coefficient (GTCC) feature and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) feature, as well as a combination of both. Finally, the speech signals were represented as frames and used as the input for the CRNN architecture. After conducting experiments, the results of the proposed system indicate higher performance with combined GTCC and MFCC features compared to GTCC or MFCC features used individually. The average accuracy of the proposed system was 92.81% in the best experiment for spoken language identification. Furthermore, the system can learn language-specific patterns in various filter size representations of speech files.

Keywords

• Arabic
• CNN
• CRNN
• classification
• language identification
• LSTM