3M: An Effective Multi-view, Multi-granularity, and Multi-aspect Modeling Approach to English Pronunciation Assessment

Fu An Chao, Tien Hong Lo, Tzu I. Wu, Yao Ting Sung, Berlin Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

21 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

As an indispensable ingredient of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT), automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) plays a pivotal role in aiding self-directed language learners by providing multi-aspect and timely feedback. However, there are at least two potential obstacles that might hinder its performance for practical use. On one hand, most of the studies focus exclusively on leveraging segmental (phonetic)-level features such as goodness of pronunciation (GOP); this, however, may cause a discrepancy of feature granularity when performing suprasegmental (prosodic)-level pronunciation assessment. On the other hand, automatic pronunciation assessments still suffer from the lack of large-scale labeled speech data of non-native speakers, which inevitably limits the performance of pronunciation assessment. In this paper, we tackle these problems by integrating multiple prosodic and phonological features to provide a multi-view, multi-granularity, and multi-aspect (3M) pronunciation modeling. Specifically, we augment GOP with prosodic and self-supervised learning (SSL) features, and meanwhile develop a vowel/consonant positional embedding for a more phonology-aware automatic pronunciation assessment. A series of experiments conducted on the publicly-available speechocean762 dataset show that our approach can obtain significant improvements on several assessment granularities in comparison with previous work, especially on the assessment of speaking fluency and speech prosody.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, APSIPA ASC 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages575-582
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9786165904773
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, APSIPA ASC 2022 - Chiang Mai, Thailand
Duration: 2022 Nov 72022 Nov 10

Publication series

NameProceedings of 2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, APSIPA ASC 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, APSIPA ASC 2022
Country/TerritoryThailand
CityChiang Mai
Period2022/11/072022/11/10

Keywords

  • computer-assisted pronunciation training
  • goodness of pronunciation
  • pronunciation assessment
  • segmental and suprasegmental features
  • self-supervised learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of '3M: An Effective Multi-view, Multi-granularity, and Multi-aspect Modeling Approach to English Pronunciation Assessment'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this