InSTIL/ICALL 2004 Symposium on Computer Assisted Learning June 17-19, 2004 Venice, Italy

Investigating the Requirements of Speech Synthesis for CALL with a View to Developing a Benchmark

Zöe Handley, Marie-Josée Hamel

Centre for Computational Linguistics, UMIST, Manchester, UK

The evaluation of speech synthesis for CALL is particularly important because speech synthesisers developed for other purposes are being re-used. Yet, very few ‘formal’ evaluations of speech synthesis for CALL have been conducted. One potential reason for the neglect of evaluation is that it is expensive in terms of both time and resources, for which it competes with further technology development. In order to achieve a balance between technology development and evaluation, benchmarking, is commonly used in the evaluation of speech and language technologies. The ultimate goal of our research is the development of a benchmark for the evaluation of speech synthesis for CALL. The first stage in the development of such a benchmark is to establish the requirements of the application. This is the goal of this paper.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Handley, Zöe / Hamel, Marie-Josée (2004): "Investigating the requirements of speech synthesis for CALL with a view to developing a benchmark", In ICALL-2004, paper 018.