Rapidly Testing the Interaction Model of a Pronunciation Training System via Wizard-of-Oz
Joao Paulo Cabral, Mark Kane, Zeeshan Ahmed, Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Éva Székely, Amalia Zahra, Kalu Ogbureke, Peter Cahill, Julie Carson-Berndsen, Stephan Schlögl
Abstract
This paper describes a prototype of a computer-assisted pronunciation training system called MySpeech. The interface of the MySpeech system is web-based and it currently enables users to practice pronunciation by listening to speech spoken by native speakers and tuning their speech production to correct any mispronunciations detected by the system. This practice exercise is facilitated in different topics and difficulty levels. An experiment was conducted in this work that combines the MySpeech service with the WebWOZ Wizard-of-Oz platform (http://www.webwoz.com), in order to improve the human-computer interaction (HCI) of the service and the feedback that it provides to the user. The employed Wizard-of-Oz method enables a human (who acts as a wizard) to give feedback to the practising user, while the user is not aware that there is another person involved in the communication. This experiment permitted to quickly test an HCI model before its implementation on the MySpeech system. It also allowed to collect input data from the wizard that can be used to improve the proposed model. Another outcome of the experiment was the preliminary evaluation of the pronunciation learning service in terms of user satisfaction, which would be difficult to conduct before integrating the HCI part.- Anthology ID:
- L12-1581
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2012
- Address:
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4136–4142
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/974_Paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Joao Paulo Cabral, Mark Kane, Zeeshan Ahmed, Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Éva Székely, Amalia Zahra, Kalu Ogbureke, Peter Cahill, Julie Carson-Berndsen, and Stephan Schlögl. 2012. Rapidly Testing the Interaction Model of a Pronunciation Training System via Wizard-of-Oz. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 4136–4142, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Rapidly Testing the Interaction Model of a Pronunciation Training System via Wizard-of-Oz (Cabral et al., LREC 2012)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/974_Paper.pdf