Multilingual Speech Processing

Chapter 8

Automatic Language

Identification

Jiˇrí Navrátil

Automatic Language Identification (LID) is the task of automatically

recognizing language from a spoken utterance. In view of current glob-

alization trends in communication technology, LID plays an essential part

in providing speech applications to a large, multilingual user community.

These may include multilingual spoken dialog systems (e.g., information

kiosks), spoken-document retrieval, and multimedia mining systems, as

well as human-to-human communication systems (call routing, speech-to-

speech translation). Due to the challenge posed by multiple (and possibly

unknown) input languages, interestin automatic LID has increased steadily,

and intensive research efforts by the speech technology community have

resulted in significant progress over the last two decades. This chapter sur-

veys the major approaches to LID, analyzes different solutions in terms

of their practical applicability, and concludes with an overview of current

trends and future research directions.

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