Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets

Eduardo Coutinho, Florian Hönig, Yue Zhang, Simone Hantke, Anton Batliner, Elmar Nöth, Björn Schuller

Abstract
In this paper, we describe a new database with audio recordings of non-native (L2) speakers of English, and the perceptual evaluation experiment conducted with native English speakers for assessing the prosody of each recording. These annotations are then used to compute the gold standard using different methods, and a series of regression experiments is conducted to evaluate their impact on the performance of a regression model predicting the degree of naturalness of L2 speech. Further, we compare the relevance of different feature groups modelling prosody in general (without speech tempo), speech rate and pauses modelling speech tempo (fluency), voice quality, and a variety of spectral features. We also discuss the impact of various fusion strategies on performance.Overall, our results demonstrate that the prosody of non-native speakers of English as L2 can be reliably assessed using supra-segmental audio features; prosodic features seem to be the most important ones.
Anthology ID:
L16-1211
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1328–1332
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1211
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Eduardo Coutinho, Florian Hönig, Yue Zhang, Simone Hantke, Anton Batliner, Elmar Nöth, and Björn Schuller. 2016. Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1328–1332, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets (Coutinho et al., LREC 2016)
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