Speech recognition in a system for teaching Japanese
Amir Najmi, Jared Bernstein · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1996
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is implemented and tested in a system to offer first-level, computer-based exercises in the Japanese language for beginning high school students. The paper describes a development project designed to identify the strengths and limitations of current ASR technology in the development of materials for computer-assisted interactive spoken language education. With current ASR technology, several kinds of pedagogically useful exercises can be constructed that should aid spoken language acquisition in a non-native student. A system design is presented, along with some example exercises and a description of methods that are used to evaluate its effectiveness with students at different levels of proficiency. At the present time, there is no agreed-upon set of ASR functions that is adequate to support many common types of teacher–student interactions. The project has begun to address such issues in the course of developing and field testing a representative set of exercises. [Work supported by the U.S. Department of Education.]