A statistical method of evaluating pronunciation proficiency for presentation in English
Seiichi Nakagawa, Kei Ohta · 2007
In this paper, we propose a statistical method of evaluating the pronunciation proficiency for presentation in English. We sta-tistically analyze the utterances to find a combination that has a high correlation between an English teacher’s score and some acoustic features. We found that ratio of the likelihoods of free phoneme recognition by using native English HMMs and non-native English HMMs was the best measure of pronunciation proficiency. The combination of likelihood ratio between na-tive English HMMs and non-native English HMMs (concate-nation of correct phone HMMs), likelihood ratio between na-