Automatic sociophonetics: Exploring corpora with a forensic accent recognition system.

This paper demonstrates how the Y-ACCDIST system, the York ACCDIST-based automatic accent recognition system [Brown (2015). Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, UK], can be used to inspect sociophonetic corpora as a preliminary "screening" tool. Although Y-ACCDIST's intended application is to assist with forensic casework, the system can also be exploited in sociophonetic research to begin unpacking variation.