INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Word Stress Assessment for Computer Aided Language Learning

Juan Pablo Arias, Nestor Becerra Yoma, Hiram Vivanco

Universidad de Chile, Chile

In this paper an automatic word stress assessment system is proposed based on a top-to-bottom scheme. The method presented is text and language independent. The utterance pronounced by the student is directly compared with a reference one. The trend similarity of F0 and energy contours are compared frame-by-frame by using DTW alignment. The stress assessment evaluation system gives an EER equal to 21.5%, which in turn is similar to the error observed in phonetic quality evaluation schemes. These results suggest that the proposed system can be employed in real applications and applicable to any language.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Arias, Juan Pablo / Yoma, Nestor Becerra / Vivanco, Hiram (2009): "Word stress assessment for computer aided language learning", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 1135-1138.