Self-imitating Feedback Generation Using GAN for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training

Self-imitating feedback is an effective and learner-friendly method for non-native learners in Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training. Acoustic characteristics in native utterances are extracted and transplanted onto learner's own speech input, and given back to the learner as a corrective feedback. Previous works focused on speech conversion using prosodic transplantation techniques based on PSOLA algorithm. Motivated by the visual differences found in spectrograms of native and non-native speeches, we investigated applying GAN to generate self-imitating feedback by utilizing generator's ability through adversarial training. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we also adopt cycle consistency loss to encourage the output to preserve the global structure, which is shared by native and non-native utterances. Trained on 97,200 spectrogram images of short utterances produced by native and non-native speakers of Korean, the generator is able to successfully transform the non-native spectrogram input to a spectrogram with properties of self-imitating feedback. Furthermore, the transformed spectrogram shows segmental corrections that cannot be obtained by prosodic transplantation. Perceptual test comparing the self-imitating and correcting abilities of our method with the baseline PSOLA method shows that the generative approach with cycle consistency loss is promising

TRANSDUCER FOR AUTO-CONVERT OF ARCHAIC TO PRESENT DAY ENGLISH FOR MACHINE READABLE TEXT: A SUPPORT FOR COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING

There exist some English literary works where some archaic words are still used; they are relatively distinct from Present Day English (PDE). We might observe some archaic words that have undergone regular changing patterns: for instances, archaic modal verbs like mightst, darest, wouldst. The –st ending historically disappears, resulting on might, dare and would. (wouldst > would). However, some archaic words undergo distinct processes, resulting on unpredictable pattern; The occurrence frequency for archaic english pronouns like thee ‘you’, thy ‘your’, thyself ‘yourself’ are quite high. Students that are Non-Native speakers of English might come across many difficulties when they encounter English texts which include these kinds of archaic words. How might computer be a help for the student? This paper aims on providing some supports from the perspective of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It proposes some designs of lexicon transducers by using Local Grammar Graphs (LGG) for auto-convert of the archaic words to PDE in a literature machine readable text. The transducer is applied to a machine readable text that is taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The archaic words in the corpus can be converted automatically to PDE. The transducer also allows the presentation of the two forms (Arhaic and PDE), the PDE lexicons-only, or the original (Archaic Lexicons) form-only. This will help students in understanding English literature works better. All the linguistic resources here are machine readable, ready to use, maintainable and open for further development. The method might be adopted for lexicon tranducer for another language too

JAVANESE VIEW ON EDUCATION: AN ETNOLINGUISTIC STUDY

This is an etnolinguistic study which is aimed to describe the Javanese view on education as reflected on its proverbs. The data of this research were Javanese proverbs dealt with education which were gathered both from literatures and observation within Javanese speaking communities. The data were then analyzed by investigating the proverbs’ form, the proverbs meaning, and its implication in education. The result of the data analysis showed that Javanese is rich of moral values as reflected on its proverbs which can be guidance in running daily activities including those in educational field

Learner Corpus Research Meets Chinese as a Second Language Acquisition: Achievements and Challenges

The article sheds light on Chinese Learner Corpus Research (CLCR), emphasizing advances and lacks in this field. First, the paper describes the potentials of learner corpora in the investigation of learner language. The specificity of learner corpus data compared to learner data in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies will be also analyzed. Second, it provides an overview of Chinese learner corpus-based research and reviews existing L2 Chinese learner corpora. The paper highlights the lack of L2 Chinese learner corpora collecting data from Italian learners and discuss the challenges and the needs of compiling L2 Chinese corpora to conduct studies on the acquisition of L2 Chinese by learners whose L1 is other than English or an Asian language. This issue is addressed by taking into account recent projects integrating the LCR methodology with L2 Chinese studies for Italian-speaking learners. Finally, the paper encourages a concrete integration between the application of the methodological framework of LCR and the implementation of the theoretical interpretation of data of SLA research in the design of Chinese acquisitional studies

The acquisition of the English dative alternation by Russian foreign language learners

Ditransitive verbs include a “recipient” and a “theme” argument (in addition to the subject). The choice of putting one argument before the other (i.e., either recipient-theme, or theme-recipient) is associated with multiple discourse-pragmatic factors. Language have different options to code the ditransitive construction. In English, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (John gives Mary a book) and the to-dative construction (to-dative) (John gives a book to Mary). In Russian, theme and recipient are marked by accusative and dative, respectively. In addition, word order is flexible and either the accusative-marked theme (Pjotr dal knigu Marii), or the dative-marked recipient (Pjotr dal Marii knigu) can come first. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Russian learners of English transfer their preferences about the theme-recipient order in Russian to the ditransitive construction in English. A total of 284 Russian students were tested. Results for both tests showed a great variability in the ratings. A comparison of the ratings seems to suggest a small positive correlation, but no statistically significant relation was found between the order preferences in both languages. However, we found a small preference for the use of the to-dative, which we relate to the language acquisition process as proposed by Processability Theory