Syllable-based Regional Swiss French Accent Identification using Prosodic Features

In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four regions of Switzerland. To achieve this goal a syllable-based classification framework is implemented using prosodic features extracted from the speech signal. Since, among these regional accents, the variations in speech mainly originate from the speaking style, i.e., different rhythm and pitch variations, rather than from the pronunciation of the words, we focus mainly on features related to variations in pitch, intensity and rhythm. For the classification task, a well known and widely used machine learning algorithm was used, i.e. support vector machines (SVM).