Usage of HMM-Based Speech Recognition Methods for Automated Determination of a Similarity Level Between Languages

2019

The problem of automated determination of language similarity (or even defining of a distance on the space of languages) could be solved in different ways – working with phonetic transcriptions, with speech recordings or both of them. For the recordings, we propose and test a HMM-based one: in the first part of our article we successfully try language detection, afterwards we are trying to calculate distances between HMM-based models, using different metrics and divergences. The Kullback-Leibler divergence is the only one we got good results with – it means that the calculated distances between languages correspond to analytical understanding of similarity between them. Even if it does not …