Kannada Dialect Classification Using CNN

Abstract

Kannada is one of the prominent languages spoken in southern India. Since the Kannada is a lingua franca and spoken by more than 70 million people, it is evident to have dialects. In this paper, we identified five major dialectal regions in Karnataka state. An attempt is made to classify these five dialects from sentence-level utterances. Sentences are segmented from continuous speech automatically by using spectral centroid and short term energy features. Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features are extracted from these sentence units. These features are used to train the convolutional neural networks (CNN). Along with MFCCs, shifted delta and double delta coefficients are also attempted to train the CNN model. The proposed CNN based dialect recognition system is also tested with internationally known standard Intonation Variation in English (IViE) dataset. The CNN model has resulted in better performance. It is observed that the use of one convolution layer and three fully connected layers balances computational complexity and results in better accuracy with both Kannada and English datasets. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.