Dialect classification using vowel acoustic parameters

Abstract

This study provides a classification model of two Modern Greek dialects, namely Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek, using information from formant dynamics of F1, F2, F3, F4 and vowel duration. To this purpose, a large corpus of vowels from 45 speakers of Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek was collected. The first four formant frequencies were measured at multiple time points and modelled using second degree polynomials. The measurements were employed in classification experiments, using three classifiers: Linear Discriminant Analysis, Flexible Discriminant Analysis, and C5.0. The latter outperformed the other classification models, resulting in a higher classification accuracy of the dialect. C5.0 classification shows that duration and the zeroth coefficient of F2, F3 and F4 contribute more to the classification of the dialect than the other measurements; it also shows that formant dynamics are important for the classification of dialect.