Automatic Classification of Regular vs. Irregular Phonation Types

Abstract. Irregular phonation (also called creaky voice, glottalization and laryngealization) may have various communicative functions in speech. Thus the automatic classification of phonation type into regular and irregular can have a number of applications in speech technology. In this paper, we propose such a classifier that extracts six acoustic cues from vowels and then labels them as regular or irregular by means of a support vector machine. We integrated cues from earlier phonation type classifiers and improved their performance in five out of the six cases. The classifier with the improved cue set produced a 98.85 % hit rate and a 3.47 % false alarm rate on a subset of the TIMIT corpus