ISCA Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing (MULTILING 2006)

Center for Language and Speech Technology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
April 9-11, 2006

PELT: An English Language Tutorial System for Polish Speakers

Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, Anna Bogacka, Dawid Pietrala, Mikolaj Wypych, Grzegorz Krynicki

School of English & Center for Speech and Language Processing, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

The Polish-English Literacy Tutor (PELT) is a multimodal multilingual tutorial system for foreign language learning (in this case English for adult Polish learners), and as such requires a specific speech recognition system dealing with highly accented, strongly variable second language speech. The aim of the paper is to present the challenges we encountered when preparing a new corpus of second language speech: phonetic characteristics of Polish English, corpus preparation and annotation, corpus statistics with the observed pronunciation problems of Polish speakers in English and the error-detector to be constructed. Solutions employed for PELT could be applied to accented foreigner speech recognition systems, e.g. English spoken by learners of various language backgrounds.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, Katarzyna / Bogacka, Anna / Pietrala, Dawid / Wypych, Mikolaj / Krynicki, Grzegorz (2006): "PELT: an English language tutorial system for Polish speakers", In MULTILING-2006, paper 012.