Acoustic Analysis of Montenegrin English L2 Vowels: Production and Perception

This study provides an acoustic analysis of Montenegrin vowels, in order to make a comparison with the already existing measurements of General American English (GAE) vowels. Also, a production analysis is done on Montenegrin (MTN) learners of English, which shows the vowels that are the most problematic in their L2 pronunciation. In addition to this, a two-way perception study was conducted with the participants. American native English speakers listened to 11 GAE vowels produced by Montenegrin speakers of English, and tried to indicate which vowels they heard, while Montenegrin speakers of English did the same after listening to native GAE speakers. The study shows that some vowels are easy for Montenegrin speakers to produce and perceive. However, certain vowels (e.g., the ones that are present in English, but not in Montenegrin) cause problems for participants in both production and perception analysis. This research helps determine the causes of miscomprehension between native speakers of GAE and Montenegrin EFL learners. These findings can help learners and teachers of ESL/EFL provide better quality instruction for Montenegrin learners by giving them more information on the problematic differences in the vowel systems of Montenegrin and English

On Understanding the Relation between Expert Annotations of Text Readability and Target Reader Comprehension

Automatic readability assessment aims to ensure that readers read texts that they can comprehend. However, computational models are typically trained on texts created from the perspective of the text writer, not the target reader. There is little experimental research on the relationship between expert annotations of readability, reader's language proficiency, and different levels of reading comprehension. To address this gap, we conducted a user study in which over a 100 participants read texts of different reading levels and answered questions created to test three forms of comprehension. Our results indicate that more than readability annotation or reader proficiency, it is the type of comprehension question asked that shows differences between reader responses - inferential questions were difficult for users of all levels of proficiency across reading levels. The data collected from this study will be released with this paper, which will, for the first time, provide a collection of 45 reader bench marked texts to evaluate readability assessment systems developed for adult learners of English. It can also potentially be useful for the development of question generation approaches in intelligent tutoring systems research

L2-ARCTIC: A Non-Native English Speech Corpus

In this paper, we introduce L2-ARCTIC, a speech corpus of non-native English that is intended for research in voice conversion, accent conversion, and mispronunciation detection. This initial release includes recordings from ten non-native speakers of English whose first languages (L1s) are Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Arabic, each L1 containing recordings from one male and one female speaker. Each speaker recorded approximately one hour of read speech from the Carnegie Mellon University ARCTIC prompts, from which we generated orthographic and forced-aligned phonetic transcriptions. In addition, we manually annotated 150 utterances per speaker to identify three types of mispronunciation errors: substitutions, deletions, and additions, making it a valuable resource not only for research in voice conversion and accent conversion but also in computer-assisted pronunciation training. The corpus is publicly accessible at https://psi.engr.tamu.edu/l2-arctic-corpus/

OneStopEnglish corpus: A new corpus for automatic readability assessment and text simplification

This paper describes the collection and compilation of the OneStopEnglish corpus of texts written at three reading levels, and demonstrates its usefulness for through two applications - automatic readability assessment and automatic text simplification. The corpus consists of 189 texts, each in three versions (567 in total). The corpus is now freely available under a CC by-SA 4.0 license1 and we hope that it would foster further research on the topics of readability assessment and text simplification.This proceeding is published as Vajjala, Sowmya, and Ivana Lucic. "OneStopEnglish corpus: A new corpus for automatic readability assessment and text simplification." In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2018): 297-304.</p

L2-ARCTIC: A Non-Native English Speech Corpus

In this paper, we introduce L2-ARCTIC, a speech corpus of non-native English that is intended for research in voice conversion, accent conversion, and mispronunciation detection. This initial release includes recordings from ten non-native speakers of English whose first languages (L1s) are Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Arabic, each L1 containing recordings from one male and one female speaker. Each speaker recorded approximately one hour of read speech from the Carnegie Mellon University ARCTIC prompts, from which we generated orthographic and forced-aligned phonetic transcriptions. In addition, we manually annotated 150 utterances per speaker to identify three types of mispronunciation errors: substitutions, deletions, and additions, making it a valuable resource not only for research in voice conversion and accent conversion but also in computer-assisted pronunciation training. The corpus is publicly accessible at https://psi.engr.tamu.edu/l2-arctic-corpus/.This article is published as Zhao, G., Sonsaat, S., Silpachai,A., Lucic, I., Chukharev-Hudilainen, E., Levis, J., Gutierrez-Osuna, R., L2-ARCTIC: A Non-Native English Speech Corpus. Perception Sensing Instrumentation Lab. 2018. Posted with permission.</p

Golden Speaker Builder - An interactive tool for pronunciation training

The type of voice model used in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Instruction is a crucial factor in the quality of practice and the amount of uptake by language learners. As an example, prior research indicates that second-language learners are more likely to succeed when they imitate a speaker with a voice similar to their own, a so-called “golden speaker”. This manuscript presents Golden Speaker Builder (GSB), a tool that allows learners to generate a personalized “golden-speaker” voice: one that mirrors their own voice but with a native accent. We describe the overall system design, including the web application with its user interface, and the underlying speech analysis/synthesis algorithms. Next, we present results from a series of listening tests, which show that GSB is capable of synthesizing such golden-speaker voices. Finally, we present results from a user study in a language-instruction setting, which show that practising with GSB leads to improved fluency and comprehensibility. We suggest reasons for why learners improved as they did and recommendations for the next iteration of the training.This accepted manuscript is published as Shaojin Ding ,Christopher Liberatore ,Sinem Sonsaat ,Ivana Luˇci ́c ,Alif Silpachai ,Guanlong Zhao ,Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen ,John Levis ,Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna , Golden Speaker Builder - An interactive tool for pronunciation train-ing,Speech Communication(2019), DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2019.10.005. Posted with permission.</p

Analysis of association between polymorphisms of MTHFR, MTHFD1 and RFC1 genes and efficacy and toxicity of methotrexate in rheumatoid arthritis patients

A folate analogue methotrexate (MTX) is the most commonly used disease-modifying drug in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. However, the clinical response of RA patients treated with MTX shows interindividual differences and 30% of patients discontinue therapy due to the side effects. In a group of 184 RA patients treated with MTX we have investigated whether polymorphisms in MTHFR (rs1801133, rs1801131), MTHFD1 (rs2236225) and RFC1 (rs144320551) genes may have impact on MTX efficacy and/or adverse drugs effects (ADEs). The efficacy of the MTX therapy has been estimated using the disease activity score in 28 joints (DAS28-ESR) based on EULAR criteria and relative DAS28 values (rDAS28) and all adverse drug events were recorded. Patients were genotyped for selected polymorphism by PCR-RFLP method. According to the EULAR response criteria after 6 months of MTX therapy 146 (79.3%) patients were classified as responders, (17 patients (11.6%) were good and 129 patients (88.4%) were moderate responders) and 38 patients (20.7%) as non-responders. ADEs were observed in 53 (28.8%) patients. The majority of ADEs were mild (36 (19.56%) patients) to moderate (12 (6.25%) patients). Five patients (2.7%) had serious ADEs. Association studies have been conducted between obtained genotypes and the efficacy and toxicity of MTX. We have observed no association between polymorphisms and efficacy or toxicity of MTX in RA patients. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 175091