• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
SRI logo
  • About
    • Press room
    • Our history
  • Expertise
    • Advanced imaging systems
    • Artificial intelligence
    • Biomedical R&D services
    • Biomedical sciences
    • Computer vision
    • Cyber & formal methods
    • Education and learning
    • Innovation strategy and policy
    • National security
    • Ocean & space
    • Quantum
    • QED-C
    • Robotics, sensors & devices
    • Speech & natural language
    • Video test & measurement
  • Ventures
  • NSIC
  • Careers
  • Contact
  • 日本支社
Search
Close
Speech & natural language publications April 1, 1997

Automatic Pronunciation Scoring for Language Instruction

Citation

Copy to clipboard


H. Franco, L. Neumeyer, Yoon Kim and O. Ronen, “Automatic pronunciation scoring for language instruction,” 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1997, pp. 1471-1474 vol.2, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.1997.596227.

Abstract

This work is part of an effort aimed at developing computer-based systems for language instruction; we address the task of grading the pronunciation quality of the speech of a student of a foreign language. The automatic grading system uses SRI’s Decipher™ continuous speech recognition system to generate phonetic segmentations. Based on these segmentations and probabilistic models we produce pronunciation scores for individual or groups of sentences. Scores obtained from expert human listeners are used as the reference to evaluate the different machine scores and to provide targets when training some of the algorithms. In previous work [1] we had found that durationbased scores outperformed HMM log-likelihood-based scores. In this paper we show that we can significantly improve HMMbased scores by using average phone segment posterior probabilities. Correlation between machine and human scores went up from r=0.50 with likelihood-based scores to r=0.88 with posterior-based scores. The new measures also outperformed duration-based scores in their ability to produce reliable scores from only a few sentences.

↓ Download

↓ View online

Share this

How can we help?

Once you hit send…

We’ll match your inquiry to the person who can best help you.

Expect a response within 48 hours.

Career call to action image

Make your own mark.

Search jobs

Our work

Case studies

Publications

Timeline of innovation

Areas of expertise

Institute

Leadership

Press room

Media inquiries

Compliance

Careers

Job listings

Contact

SRI Ventures

Our locations

Headquarters

333 Ravenswood Ave
Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA

+1 (650) 859-2000

Subscribe to our newsletter


日本支社
SRI International
  • Contact us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookies
  • DMCA
  • Copyright © 2022 SRI International