Grants and Contributions:

Automated Modeling of Spoken Language for Language Proficiency Testing

968564

$25,000.00

Jul 22, 2021 - Mar 31, 2022

We will develop automatic systems to evaluate the proficiency of non-native learners of French, considering primarily the acoustic-phonetic aspects of speech, rather than the lexical content. We will focus on measures such as fluency (measured by speaking rate), quality of pronunciation, and intelligibility. Higher-level measures of proficiency such as vocabulary sophistication, grammar and topic development will be left to NRC researchers.To evaluate our chosen measures, we will build our own systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR) for French speech, building in the capability to work well on non-native accents. Using our own system will allow us to access to the internal properties of the system, necessary to determine information such as word-level timings, word-level confidence measures, and the deviation of the user from standard pronunciations at the phonetic level, as well as detecting when the user is speaking.Using the extracted measures as input features, we will train downstream classifiers – such as deep neural networks – to predict human judgments of spoken language proficiency on a collection of recordings from language learners. We will further explore whether these classifiers can be trained in a language-independent way, using a collection from learners of English, for example.

National Research Council Canada

In the short term, anticipated outcomes will be strengthened collaborations across industry, academia, and government to support research excellence. In the medium term, anticipated outcomes will be the development of new and potentially disruptive technologies with collaborators.

Edinburgh, GB

172-2021-2022-Q2-968564

Grant

Grants and Contributions

000000000

Not-for-profit organization or charity

University of Edinburgh

Collaborative Science, Technology and Innovation Program – Ideation Fund

The Ideation Fund is intended to encourage, test and validate transformative research ideas generated by teams of NRC scientific personnel and external collaborators with complementary capabilities, acting as a demonstration phase for a continually-evolving suite of research and development (R&D) deliverables at the NRC. The fund supports exploratory research through two mechanisms: the New Beginnings Initiative and the Small Teams Initiative.

541710