7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing September 16-20, 2002 Denver, Colorado, USA

Automatic Intelligibility Assessment and Diagnosis of Critical Pronunciation Errors for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Learning

Antoine Raux, Tatsuya Kawahara

Kyoto University, Japan

We introduce a novel method to diagnose pronunciation errors that are most critical to the intelligibility of L2 learners. A preliminary study showed that error rates computed by a speech recognitionbased system can be used to characterize intelligibility. We deduce a probabilistic algorithm to derive intelligibility from error rates. We also define an error priority function that indicates which errors are most critical to intelligibility. Experimental results proved the validity of the approach.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Raux, Antoine / Kawahara, Tatsuya (2002): "Automatic intelligibility assessment and diagnosis of critical pronunciation errors for computer-assisted pronunciation learning", In ICSLP-2002, 737-740.