Analysis and modeling of dialect information in Ao, a low resource language

Ao is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, India. It is a low resource, tonal language with three lexical tones, namely, high, mid, and low. However, tone assignment on lexical words may differ among the three dialects of Ao, namely, Chungli, Mongsen, and Changki. In this work, an acoustic study is conducted on the three tones in the three dialects of Ao. It was found that the acoustic characteristics of the tones in the Changki dialect are markedly different from that of the Chungli and the Mongsen dialects. Hence, in the latter part of the work, automatic dialect identification (DID) in the Ao dialects is attempted with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Shifted Delta Cepstral coefficients, and F0 features using the Gaussian Mixture models. It is confirmed that in both text-dependent and text-independent DID, the F0 features improve the accuracy of classification.