Automatic Scoring for Prosodic Proficiency of English Sentences Spoken by Japanese Based on Utterance Comparison(Speech Synthesis and Prosody, Corpus-Based Speech Technologies)
Yoichi Yamashita, Keisuke Kato, Kazunori Nozawa · IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems · 2005
This paper describes techniques of scoring prosodic proficiency of English sentences spoken by Japanese. The multiple regression model predicts the prosodic proficiency using new prosodic measures based on the characteristics of Japanese novice learners of English. Prosodic measures are calculated by comparing prosodic parameters, such as F 0 , power and duration, of learner's and native speaker's speech. The new measures include the approximation error of the fitting line and the comparison result of prosodic parameters for a limited segment of the word boundary rather than the whole utterance. This paper reveals that the introduction of the new measures improved the correlation by 0.1 between the teachers' and automatic scores.