EduSpeak®: A speech recognition and pronunciation scoring toolkit for computer-aided language learning applications

SRI International’s EduSpeak® system is a software development toolkit that enables developers of interactive language education software to use state-of-the-art speech recognition and pronunciation scoring technology. Automatic pronunciation scoring allows the computer to provide feedback on the ov...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Language testing Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 401 - 418
Main Authors:	Franco, Horacio, Bratt, Harry, Rossier, Romain, Rao Gadde, Venkata, Shriberg, Elizabeth, Abrash, Victor, Precoda, Kristin
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	London, England SAGE Publications 01-07-2010 Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects:	Algorithms Classification Communication Computer Assisted Instruction Computer Software Continuous speech Educational Technology Elementary school students Error Correction Feedback Feedback (Response) International languages Language acquisition Language Proficiency Language Tests Oral Language Phonetics Predictor Variables Pronunciation Quality Scoring Second Language Instruction Second Language Learning Sentences Software Spanish Speech Teaching Methods Voice recognition Greece New York United Kingdom > UK Monaco United States > US Sydney New South Wales Australia Australia automatic pronunciation scoring computer aided language learning mispronunciation detection
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Summary:	SRI International’s EduSpeak® system is a software development toolkit that enables developers of interactive language education software to use state-of-the-art speech recognition and pronunciation scoring technology. Automatic pronunciation scoring allows the computer to provide feedback on the overall quality of pronunciation and to point to specific production problems. We review our approach to pronunciation scoring, where our aim is to estimate the grade that a human expert would assign to the pronunciation quality of a paragraph or a phrase. Using databases of nonnative speech and corresponding human ratings at the sentence level, we evaluate different machine scores that can be used as predictor variables to estimate pronunciation quality. For more specific feedback on pronunciation, the EduSpeak toolkit supports a phone-level mispronunciation detection functionality that automatically flags specific phone segments that have been mispronounced. Phone-level information makes it possible to provide the student with feedback about specific pronunciation mistakes.Two approaches to mispronunciation detection were evaluated in a phonetically transcribed database of 130,000 phones uttered in continuous speech sentences by 206 nonnative speakers. Results show that classification error of the best system, for the phones that can be reliably transcribed, is only slightly higher than the average pairwise disagreement between the human transcribers.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0265-5322 1477-0946
DOI:	10.1177/0265532210364408