Speech Processing for Text Independent Amharic Language Dialect Recognition

Abstract

Dialect is a difference of verbal communication spoken by people from a particular society or geographic area so the paper focuses on Amharic language dialect recognition. In this paper,  the authors have used backpropagation artificial neural network, VQ(vector quantization), (Gaussian Mixture Models) and a combination of GMM and backpropagation artificial neural network for classifying dialects of Amharic language speakers. In this research, a total of 100 speakers for each group of dialects are considered each having about 10 seconds duration is collected. The feature vectors of Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) had been used to recognize the dialects of speakers. In this research paper the recognition model that uses a tanh activation function have a better result instead of using the Logistic Sigmoid activation function in backpropagation artificial neural network. After conducting the above experiments 95.7% accuracy achieved when GMM and backpropagation artificial neural network with tanh activation function are combined.