Automatic Detection of English Mispronunciation Using Speaker Adaptation and Automatic Assessment of English Intonation and Rhythm

概要

論文の詳細を見る
This paper describes evaluation methods of English utterances by Japanese speaker. The proposed methods consist of the following two methods: a pronunciation evaluation method and a prosody evaluation method. The pronunciation evaluation method detects phoneme-level mispronunciations, and the prosody evaluation method treats intonation and rhythm of the speech. The pronunciation evaluation method exploits VFS speaker adaptation technique to improve precision of phoneme labeling. On the adaptation, we developed a new adaptation scheme that uses Japanese utterance to adapt English acoustic models. This method enables speaker adaptation for speakers who are not good at English pronunciation. The prosody evaluation method compares the pitch pattern of native speakers' utterances and that of a learner's one, and returns a score that reflects the utterance's naturalness. Besides intonation, the method compares the rhythm of utterances between native speakers' speech and the learner's one. Evaluation experiments are carried out to compare native speakers' evaluation scores and the system's one against Japanese speakers' utterances, and we obtained significant correlation between the two evaluations.
日本教育工学会の論文
2006-10-00