Applying rhythm features to automatically assess non-native speech
Lei Chen, Klaus Zechner · 2011
Speech rhythm measurements have been used in a limited num-ber of previous studies on automated speech assessment, an ap-proach using speech recognition technology to judge non-native speakers ’ proficiency levels. However, one of the most prob-lematic issues of these previous studies is a lack of a compar-ison of these rhythm features with other effective non-rhythm features found in decade-long previous research. In this paper, we extracted both non-rhythm and rhythm features and com-pared them with respect to their performances to predict profi-ciency scores rated by humans. We show that adding rhythm features significantly improves the performance of the scoring model based only on non-rhythm features. Index Terms: automated speech assessment, speech rhythm, prosody