A Comparative Study on Native and Non-Native English Accent Classifications

Speech and language recognition is one of the most important requirements in daily life. Most people in the world use English as the highly preferable language for easy communication. As a result, English is the highest speaking language in the World. Speech is the easiest way of medium for communication. Hunan-human, human-machine, and machine-machine communication are very much dependent on extensive and robust speech recognition. There are various important features of speech. The accent is one of them. It is a unique feature of speech that varies according to region and dialect. Speech scientists are continuously working on the improvement of speech recognition techniques and performance. Various challenges are being faced day by day and new areas of research are opened to overcome those difficulties. Variation of accent is one of the biggest challenges in improving speech recognition performances. In this work, the native and non-native English accent has been considered. The classification task has been performed on the English speech of non-native speakers and native American English speakers. Three sets of male and female speaker data both for native and non-native speech have been collected from the Voice Cloning Toolkit corpus of the Centre for Speech Technology Research. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient features were extracted from the audio signals and given as input parameters to the supervised machine learning models. Evaluation metrics have been generated, multiple results were produced and compared.