INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

New Feature Parameters for Pronunciation Evaluation in English Presentations at International Conferences

Hiroshi Kibishi, Seiichi Nakagawa

Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan

We have previously proposed a statistical method for estimating the pronunciation proficiency and intelligibility of presentations made in English by non-native speakers. To investigate the relationship between various acoustic measures and the pronunciation score and intelligibility, we statistically analyzed the speaker's actual utterances to find combinations of acoustic features with a high correlation between the score estimated by a linear regression model and the score perceived by native English teachers. In this paper, we examined the quality of new acoustic features that are useful when used in combination with the system's estimates of pronunciation score and intelligibility. Results showed that the best combination of acoustic features produced correlation coefficients of 0.929 and 0.753 for pronunciation and intelligibility, respectively, using open data for speakers at the 10-sentence level.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kibishi, Hiroshi / Nakagawa, Seiichi (2011): "New feature parameters for pronunciation evaluation in English presentations at international conferences", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1149-1152.