Developing a Benchmark for Pronunciation Feedback: Creation of a Phonemically Annotated Speech Corpus of isiZulu Language Learner Speech

Alexandra O’Neil, Nils Hjortnaes, Francis Tyers, Zinhle Nkosi, Thulile Ndlovu, Zanele Mlondo, Ngami Phumzile Pewa

Abstract
Pronunciation of the phonemic inventory of a new language often presents difficulties to second language (L2) learners. These challenges can be alleviated by the development of pronunciation feedback tools that take speech input from learners and return information about errors in the utterance. This paper presents the development of a corpus designed for use in pronunciation feedback research. The corpus is comprised of gold standard recordings from isiZulu teachers and recordings from isiZulu L2 learners that have been annotated for pronunciation errors. Exploring the potential benefits of word-level versus phoneme-level feedback necessitates a speech corpus that has been annotated for errors on the phoneme-level. To aid in this discussion, this corpus of isiZulu L2 speech has been annotated for phoneme-errors in utterances, as well as suprasegmental errors in tone.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.429
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4795–4801
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.429
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandra O’Neil, Nils Hjortnaes, Francis Tyers, Zinhle Nkosi, Thulile Ndlovu, Zanele Mlondo, and Ngami Phumzile Pewa. 2024. Developing a Benchmark for Pronunciation Feedback: Creation of a Phonemically Annotated Speech Corpus of isiZulu Language Learner Speech. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4795–4801, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Developing a Benchmark for Pronunciation Feedback: Creation of a Phonemically Annotated Speech Corpus of isiZulu Language Learner Speech (O’Neil et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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