1,061 research outputs found
Automatic Pronunciation Assessment -- A Review
Pronunciation assessment and its application in computer-aided pronunciation
training (CAPT) have seen impressive progress in recent years. With the rapid
growth in language processing and deep learning over the past few years, there
is a need for an updated review. In this paper, we review methods employed in
pronunciation assessment for both phonemic and prosodic. We categorize the main
challenges observed in prominent research trends, and highlight existing
limitations, and available resources. This is followed by a discussion of the
remaining challenges and possible directions for future work.Comment: 9 pages, accepted to EMNLP Finding
Rapid Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries for new Domains and Languages
This dissertation presents innovative strategies and methods for the rapid generation of pronunciation dictionaries for new domains and languages. Depending on various conditions, solutions are proposed and developed. Starting from the straightforward scenario in which the target language is present in written form on the Internet and the mapping between speech and written language is close up to the difficult scenario in which no written form for the target language exists
Recommended from our members
Deep Learning for Automatic Assessment and Feedback of Spoken English
Growing global demand for learning a second language (L2), particularly English, has led to
considerable interest in automatic spoken language assessment, whether for use in computerassisted language learning (CALL) tools or for grading candidates for formal qualifications.
This thesis presents research conducted into the automatic assessment of spontaneous nonnative English speech, with a view to be able to provide meaningful feedback to learners. One
of the challenges in automatic spoken language assessment is giving candidates feedback on
particular aspects, or views, of their spoken language proficiency, in addition to the overall
holistic score normally provided. Another is detecting pronunciation and other types of errors
at the word or utterance level and feeding them back to the learner in a useful way.
It is usually difficult to obtain accurate training data with separate scores for different
views and, as examiners are often trained to give holistic grades, single-view scores can
suffer issues of consistency. Conversely, holistic scores are available for various standard
assessment tasks such as Linguaskill. An investigation is thus conducted into whether
assessment scores linked to particular views of the speaker’s ability can be obtained from
systems trained using only holistic scores.
End-to-end neural systems are designed with structures and forms of input tuned to single
views, specifically each of pronunciation, rhythm, intonation and text. By training each
system on large quantities of candidate data, individual-view information should be possible
to extract. The relationships between the predictions of each system are evaluated to examine
whether they are, in fact, extracting different information about the speaker. Three methods
of combining the systems to predict holistic score are investigated, namely averaging their
predictions and concatenating and attending over their intermediate representations. The
combined graders are compared to each other and to baseline approaches.
The tasks of error detection and error tendency diagnosis become particularly challenging
when the speech in question is spontaneous and particularly given the challenges posed by
the inconsistency of human annotation of pronunciation errors. An approach to these tasks is
presented by distinguishing between lexical errors, wherein the speaker does not know how a
particular word is pronounced, and accent errors, wherein the candidate’s speech exhibits
consistent patterns of phone substitution, deletion and insertion. Three annotated corpora
x
of non-native English speech by speakers of multiple L1s are analysed, the consistency of
human annotation investigated and a method presented for detecting individual accent and
lexical errors and diagnosing accent error tendencies at the speaker level
Automatic Speech Recognition for Low-resource Languages and Accents Using Multilingual and Crosslingual Information
This thesis explores methods to rapidly bootstrap automatic speech recognition systems for languages, which lack resources for speech and language processing. We focus on finding approaches which allow using data from multiple languages to improve the performance for those languages on different levels, such as feature extraction, acoustic modeling and language modeling. Under application aspects, this thesis also includes research work on non-native and Code-Switching speech
A comparison-based approach to mispronunciation detection
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-92).This thesis focuses on the problem of detecting word-level mispronunciations in nonnative speech. Conventional automatic speech recognition-based mispronunciation detection systems have the disadvantage of requiring a large amount of language-specific, annotated training data. Some systems even require a speech recognizer in the target language and another one in the students' native language. To reduce human labeling effort and for generalization across all languages, we propose a comparison-based framework which only requires word-level timing information from the native training data. With the assumption that the student is trying to enunciate the given script, dynamic time warping (DTW) is carried out between a student's utterance (nonnative speech) and a teacher's utterance (native speech), and we focus on detecting mis-alignment in the warping path and the distance matrix. The first stage of the system locates word boundaries in the nonnative utterance. To handle the problem that nonnative speech often contains intra-word pauses, we run DTW with a silence model which can align the two utterances, detect and remove silences at the same time. In order to segment each word into smaller, acoustically similar, units for a finer-grained analysis, we develop a phoneme-like unit segmentor which works by segmenting the selfsimilarity matrix into low-distance regions along the diagonal. Both phone-level and wordlevel features that describe the degree of mis-alignment between the two utterances are extracted, and the problem is formulated as a classification task. SVM classifiers are trained, and three voting schemes are considered for the cases where there are more than one matching reference utterance. The system is evaluated on the Chinese University Chinese Learners of English (CUCHLOE) corpus, and the TIMIT corpus is used as the native corpus. Experimental results have shown 1) the effectiveness of the silence model in guiding DTW to capture the word boundaries in nonnative speech more accurately, 2) the complimentary performance of the word-level and the phone-level features, and 3) the stable performance of the system with or without phonetic units labeling.by Ann Lee.S.M
Acoustic Modelling for Under-Resourced Languages
Automatic speech recognition systems have so far been developed only for very few languages out of the 4,000-7,000 existing ones.
In this thesis we examine methods to rapidly create acoustic models in new, possibly under-resourced languages, in a time and cost effective manner. For this we examine the use of multilingual models, the application of articulatory features across languages, and the automatic discovery of word-like units in unwritten languages
- …