For researching effects of gamification in foreign language learning for children in the "Say It Again, Kid!" project we developed a feedback paradigm that can drive gameplay in pronunciation learning games. We describe our scoring system based on the difference between a reference phone sequence and the output of a multilingual CTC phoneme recogniser. We present a white-box scoring model of mapped weighted Levenshtein edit distance between reference and error with error weights for articulatory differences computed from a training set of scored utterances. The system can produce a human-readable list of each detected mispronunciation's contribution to the utterance score. We compare our scoring method to established black box methods.
@article{arxiv.1905.02639,
title = {Transparent pronunciation scoring using articulatorily weighted phoneme edit distance},
author = {Reima Karhila and Anna-Riikka Smolander and Sari Ylinen and Mikko Kurimo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.02639},
year = {2019}
}