Using Rhetorical Structure Theory to Assess Discourse Coherence for Non-native Spontaneous Speech

Xinhao Wang, Binod Gyawali, James V. Bruno, Hillary R. Molloy, Keelan Evanini, Klaus Zechner

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Abstract
This study aims to model the discourse structure of spontaneous spoken responses within the context of an assessment of English speaking proficiency for non-native speakers. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been commonly used in the analysis of discourse organization of written texts; however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and parsing of spoken language, in particular, non-native spontaneous speech. Due to the fact that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key metric in human scoring rubrics for assessments of spoken language, we conducted research to obtain RST annotations on non-native spoken responses from a standardized assessment of academic English proficiency. Subsequently, automatic parsers were trained on these annotations to process non-native spontaneous speech. Finally, a set of features were extracted from automatically generated RST trees to evaluate the discourse structure of non-native spontaneous speech, which were then employed to further improve the validity of an automated speech scoring system.
Anthology ID:
W19-2719
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, MN
Editors:
Amir Zeldes, Debopam Das, Erick Maziero Galani, Juliano Desiderato Antonio, Mikel Iruskieta
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
153–162
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2719
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2719
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinhao Wang, Binod Gyawali, James V. Bruno, Hillary R. Molloy, Keelan Evanini, and Klaus Zechner. 2019. Using Rhetorical Structure Theory to Assess Discourse Coherence for Non-native Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019, pages 153–162, Minneapolis, MN. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using Rhetorical Structure Theory to Assess Discourse Coherence for Non-native Spontaneous Speech (Wang et al., NAACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W19-2719.pdf
Presentation:
 W19-2719.Presentation.pptx
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