Deep neural architectures for dialect classification with single frequency filtering and zero-time windowing feature representations

The goal of this study is to investigate advanced signal processing approaches [single frequency filtering (SFF) and zero-time windowing (ZTW)] with modern deep neural networks (DNNs) [convolution neural networks (CNNs), temporal convolution neural networks (TCN), time-delay neural network (TDNN), and emphasized channel attention, propagation and aggregation in TDNN (ECAPA-TDNN)] for dialect classification of major dialects of English. Previous studies indicated that SFF and ZTW methods provide higher spectro-temporal resolution. To capture the intrinsic variations in articulations among dialects, four feature representations [spectrogram (SPEC), cepstral coefficients, mel filter-bank energies, and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs)] are derived from SFF and ZTW methods. Experiments with and without data augmentation using CNN classifiers revealed that the proposed features performed better than baseline short-time Fourier transform (STFT)-based features on the UT-Podcast database [Hansen, J. H., and Liu, G. (2016). "Unsupervised accent classification for deep data fusion of accent and language information, " Speech Commun. 78, 19-33]. Even without data augmentation, all the proposed features showed an approximate improvement of 15%-20% (relative) over best baseline (SPEC-STFT) feature. TCN, TDNN, and ECAPA-TDNN classifiers that capture wider temporal context further improved the performance for many of the proposed and baseline features. Among all the baseline and proposed features, the best performance is achieved with single frequency filtered cepstral coefficients for TCN (81.30%), TDNN (81.53%), and ECAPA-TDNN (85.48%). An investigation of data-driven filters, instead of fixed mel-scale, improved the performance by 2.8% and 1.4% (relatively) for SPEC-STFT and SPEC-SFF, and nearly equal for SPEC-ZTW. To assist related work, we have made the code available ([Kethireddy, R., and Kadiri, S. R. (2022). "Deep neural architectures for dialect classification with single frequency filtering and zero-time windowing feature representations, " https://github.com/r39ashmi/e2e_dialect (Last viewed 21 December 2021)].). (C) 2022 Acoustical Society of America.