Abstract
The present research is an effort to enhance the performance of voice processing systems, in our case the speaker identification system (SIS) by addressing the variability caused by the dialectical variations of a language. We present an effective solution to reduce dialect-related variability from voice processing systems. The proposed method minimizes the system's complexity by reducing search space during the testing process of speaker identification. The speaker is searched from the set of speakers of the identified dialect instead of all the speakers present in system training. The study is conducted on the Pashto language, and the voice data samples are collected from native Pashto speakers of specific regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Pashto is spoken with different dialectal variations. The task of speaker identification is achieved with the help of a novel hierarchical framework that works in two steps. In the first step, the speaker's dialect is identified. For automated dialect identification, the spectral and prosodic features have been used in conjunction with Gaussian mixture model (GMM). In the second step, the speaker is identified using a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based speaker identification system, which gets aggregated input from the first step, i.e., dialect identification along with prosodic and spectral features. The robustness of the proposed SIS is compared with traditional state-of-the-art methods in the literature. The results show that the proposed framework is better in terms of average speaker recognition accuracy (84.5% identification accuracy) and consumes 39% less time for the identification of speaker.