AUTOMATIC ASSESSMENT OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS' FLUENCY
Helmer Strik, Catia Cucchiarini · 1999
This paper describes an experiment aimed at determining whether speech. automatic assessment of second language learners' fluency in This experiment produced interesting results in two respects, spontaneous speech is feasible and whether it differs from a. fluency assessment by expert raters and b. the relationship automatic fluency assessment in read speech. Spontaneous speech between expert fluency ratings and automatically obtained objective of 60 learners of Dutch was scored for fluency by five raters and fluency measures. With regard to a., the results showed that expert was analyzed by means of a continuous speech recognizer to ratings of fluency in read speech are reliable (Cronbachs' # varies calculate seven quantitative measures of speech quality known to be between .90 and .96). With respect to b., very high correlations related to perceived fluency. The results show that automatic were found between the expert fluency ratings and the automatic assessment of second language...