2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information
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Paper Detail

Paper IDHLT-15.1
Paper Title MISPRONUNCIATION DETECTION IN NON-NATIVE (L2) ENGLISH WITH UNCERTAINTY MODELING
Authors Daniel Korzekwa, Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba, Amazon, Poland; Szymon Zaporowski, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland; Shira Calamaro, Thomas Drugman, Amazon, United States; Bozena Kostek, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
SessionHLT-15: Language Assessment
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Thursday, 10 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Time:Thursday, 10 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Human Language Technology: [HLT-LACL] Language Acquisition and Learning
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Abstract A common approach to the automatic detection of mispronunciation in language learning is to recognize the phonemes produced by a student and compare it to the expected pronunciation of a native speaker. This approach makes two simplifying assumptions: a) phonemes can be recognized from speech with high accuracy, b) there is a single correct way for a sentence to be pronounced. These assumptions do not always hold, which can result in a significant amount of false mispronunciation alarms. We propose a novel approach to overcome this problem based on two principles: a) taking into account uncertainty in the automatic phoneme recognition step, b) accounting for the fact that there may be multiple valid pronunciations. We evaluate the model on non-native (L2) English speech of German, Italian and Polish speakers, where it is shown to increase the precision of detecting mispronunciations by up to 18% (relative) compared to the common approach.