Language and dialect identification lies at the interface between the information sciences and technologies, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences. Our research is mainly concerned with two complementary aspects:

• studying between-langage and between-dialect perceptual distance
• modelling acoustico-phonetic and phonological cues for automatic identification purposes

• Afro-Asiatic languages (Contact : M. Barkat Defradas ; N. Louali)
• European languages (Contact : F. Pellegrino)
• Arabic dialects (Contact : M. Barkat Defradas ; R. Hamdi)
• English dialects (Contact : E. Ferragne)

Human beings possess the ability to understand the meaning of utterances produced under a wide range of conditions that can be subsumed under two categories:

• production (between- and within-speaker variability)
• environment (spatial distance between speaker and hearer, background noise, telephone speech vs. direct conversation, etc.)

It is possible to extract several acoustic parameters from recordings of a given person's voice. These parameters are then used to build a model for this speaker and to compute a distance metric between various speakers. This distance is defined mathematically or empirically, and it does not necessarily correspond to perceptual distance. In the field of speaker identification, for instance, it should be noted that recordings of an unknown voice will by no means allow the researcher to infer the speaker's identity with absolute certainty. Although these techniques are highly controversial – especially when employed in a forensic context – they can be used for other purposes such as content-based document indexing, or as an access control for automatic client identification procedures.