Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning

Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning
Author: Florian Hönig
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3832545670

Worldwide there is a universal need for second language language learning. It is obvious that the computer can be a great help for this, especially when equipped with methods for automatically assessing the learner's pronunciation. While assessment of segmental pronunciation quality (i.,e. whether phones and words are pronounced correctly or not) is already available in commercial software packages, prosody (i.e. rhythm, word accent, etc.) is largely ignored--although it highly impacts intelligibility and listening effort. The present thesis contributes to closing this gap by developing and analyzing methods for automatically assessing the prosody of non-native speakers. We study the detection of word accent errors and the general assessment of the appropriateness of a speaker's rhythm. We propose a flexible, generic approach that is (a) very successful on these tasks, (b) competitive to other state-of-the-art result, and at the same time (c) flexible and easily adapted to new tasks.

The Music of Everyday Speech

The Music of Everyday Speech
Author: Ann Wennerstrom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2001-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198032714

Recently there has been a growing interest among discourse analysts in incorporating prosody into the analysis of spoken language. Wennerstrom considers the role of prosody in a variety of discourse genres and offers an over-all framework within which future analysis might continue.

Automatic Assessment of Children Speech to Support Language Learning

Automatic Assessment of Children Speech to Support Language Learning
Author: Christian Hacker
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2009
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3832522581

Focus of this work are pattern recognition related aspects of computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) for second language learning. An overview of commercial systems shows that pronunciation training is being addressed by the growing field of computer assisted language learning only to a small extend, although in the state-of-the-art section a number of such approaches for automatic assessment can already be presented. In the present thesis different approaches are extended and combined. In particular a large set of nearly 200 pronunciation and prosodic features is developed. By this approach pronunciation scoring is regarded as classification task in high-dimensional feature space. Automatic speech recognition is the basis of most pronunciation scoring algorithms. In this thesis a system is presented, which supports second language learning at school, i.e. the target users are children. For this reason a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine is adapted to children speech, since young speakers are only hardly recognised by automatic systems. Phonetically motivated rules for typical mispronunciation errors are integrated into the system to make it suitable for pronunciation scoring. Evaluating an algorithm for pronunciation assessment is more difficult than simply counting the correctly recognised mistakes, since there exists no objective ground truth. This can be shown by evaluating the annotations of 14 teachers. However, with different measures it can be verified that the accuracy of the system (in comparison with teachers) thoroughly reaches the agreement among teachers. The evaluation is conducted with native German speakers learning English.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
Author: Carlos Gussenhoven
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 957
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0198832230

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

Computational Paralinguistics

Computational Paralinguistics
Author: Björn Schuller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1118706625

This book presents the methods, tools and techniques that are currently being used to recognise (automatically) the affect, emotion, personality and everything else beyond linguistics (‘paralinguistics’) expressed by or embedded in human speech and language. It is the first book to provide such a systematic survey of paralinguistics in speech and language processing. The technology described has evolved mainly from automatic speech and speaker recognition and processing, but also takes into account recent developments within speech signal processing, machine intelligence and data mining. Moreover, the book offers a hands-on approach by integrating actual data sets, software, and open-source utilities which will make the book invaluable as a teaching tool and similarly useful for those professionals already in the field. Key features: Provides an integrated presentation of basic research (in phonetics/linguistics and humanities) with state-of-the-art engineering approaches for speech signal processing and machine intelligence. Explains the history and state of the art of all of the sub-fields which contribute to the topic of computational paralinguistics. C overs the signal processing and machine learning aspects of the actual computational modelling of emotion and personality and explains the detection process from corpus collection to feature extraction and from model testing to system integration. Details aspects of real-world system integration including distribution, weakly supervised learning and confidence measures. Outlines machine learning approaches including static, dynamic and context‐sensitive algorithms for classification and regression. Includes a tutorial on freely available toolkits, such as the open-source ‘openEAR’ toolkit for emotion and affect recognition co-developed by one of the authors, and a listing of standard databases and feature sets used in the field to allow for immediate experimentation enabling the reader to build an emotion detection model on an existing corpus.

The Path of Speech Technologies in Computer Assisted Language Learning

The Path of Speech Technologies in Computer Assisted Language Learning
Author: Melissa Holland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2008-02-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1135901481

This collection examines the promise and limitations for computer-assisted language learning of emerging speech technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and acoustic visualization. Using pioneering research from contributors based in the US and Europe, this volume illustrates the uses of each technology for learning languages, the problems entailed in their use, and the solutions evolving in both technology and instructional design. To illuminate where these technologies stand on the path from research toward practice, the book chapters are organized to reflect five stages in the maturation of learning technologies: basic research, analysis of learners’ needs, adaptation of technologies to meet needs, development of prototypes to incorporate adapted technologies, and evaluation of prototypes. The volume demonstrates the progress in employing each class of speech technology while pointing up the effort that remains for effective, reliable application to language learning.

Second Language Prosody and Computer Modeling

Second Language Prosody and Computer Modeling
Author: Okim Kang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100043558X

This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of second language prosody and computer modeling. It addresses the importance of prosody’s role in communication, bridging the gap between applied linguistics and computer science. The book illustrates the growing importance of the relationship between automated speech recognition systems and language learning assessment in light of new technologies and showcases how the study of prosody in this context in particular can offer innovative insights into the computerized process of natural discourse. The book offers detailed accounts of different methods of analysis and computer models used and demonstrates how these models can be applied to L2 discourse analysis toward predicting real-world language use. Kang, Johnson, and Kermad also use these frameworks as a jumping-off point from which to propose new models of second language prosody and future directions for prosodic computer modeling more generally. Making the case for the use of naturalistic data for real-world applications in empirical research, this volume will foster interdisciplinary dialogues across students and researchers in applied linguistics, speech communication, speech science, and computer engineering.