Identification of foreign-accented French using data mining techniques

The goal of this study is to automatically differentiate foreign accents in French (Arabic, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). We took advantage of automatic alignment into phonemes of non-native French recordings to measure vowel formants, consonant duration and voicing, prosodic cues as well as pronunciation variants combining French and foreign acoustic units (e.g. a rolled ‘r’). We retained 62 features which we used for training a classifier to discriminate speakers’ foreign accents. We obtained over 50% correct identification by using a cross-validation method including unseen data (a few sentences from 36 speakers). The best automatically selected features are robust to corpus change and make sense with regard to linguistic knowledge.