@inproceedings{chen-etal-2022-automatically,
    title = "Automatically Detecting Reduced-formed {E}nglish Pronunciations by Using Deep Learning",
    author = "Chen, Lei  and
      Jiang, Chenglin  and
      Gu, Yiwei  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Yuan, Jiahong",
    editor = {Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Tack, Ana{\"i}s  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng  and
      Zesch, Torsten},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, Washington",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.bea-1.4/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.bea-1.4",
    pages = "22--26",
    abstract = "Reduced form pronunciations are widely used by native English speakers, especially in casual conversations. Second language (L2) learners have difficulty in processing reduced form pronunciations in listening comprehension and face challenges in production too. Meanwhile, training applications dedicated to reduced forms are still few. To solve this issue, we report on our first effort of using deep learning to evaluate L2 learners' reduced form pronunciations. Compared with a baseline solution that uses an ASR to determine regular or reduced-formed pronunciations, a classifier that learns representative features via a convolution neural network (CNN) on low-level acoustic features, yields higher detection performance. F-1 metric has been increased from 0.690 to 0.757 on the reduction task. Furthermore, adding word entities to compute attention weights to better adjust the features learned by the CNN model helps increasing F-1 to 0.763."
}