@inproceedings{el-kheir-etal-2026-complementary,
    title = "The Complementary Role of Para-linguistic cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment",
    author = "El Kheir, Yassine  and
      Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and
      Ali, Ahmed",
    editor = "Riccardi, Giuseppe  and
      Mousavi, Seyed Mahed  and
      Torres, Maria Ines  and
      Yoshino, Koichiro  and
      Callejas, Zoraida  and
      Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung  and
      Bechet, Frederic  and
      Gustafson, Joakim  and
      Damnati, G{\'e}raldine  and
      Papangelis, Alex  and
      D{'}Haro, Luis Fernando  and
      Mendon{\c{c}}a, John  and
      Bernardi, Raffaella  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Di Fabbrizio, Giuseppe {''}Pino{''}  and
      Kawahara, Tatsuya  and
      Alam, Firoj  and
      Tur, Gokhan  and
      Johnston, Michael",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology",
    month = feb,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Trento, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/dashboard-stats/2026.iwsds-1.30/",
    pages = "302--306",
    abstract = "Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic and phonological aspects of non-native ({L}2) speech, often neglecting the rich layer of information hidden within the para-linguistic cues. In this study, we proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, \textbf{{I}ntra{V}erbal{PA}}.[The source code will be available to the public upon acceptance.] The framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract utterance-level para-linguistic cues, alongside the raw speech and phoneme representations. Additionally, we introduce the ``Goodness of phonemic-duration'' metric to model phoneme duration distribution within the framework effectively. Our results validate the effectiveness of the proposed {I}ntra{V}erbal{PA} framework and its individual components, yielding performance that matches or outperforms existing research works."
}