Related papers: PTeacher: a Computer-Aided Personalized Pronunciat…

This paper presents the "Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Spoken Language Assessment and Feedback" -- a challenge associated with the ISCA SLaTE 2025 Workshop. The goal of the challenge is to advance research on spoken language assessment…

Accent is an integral part of society, reflecting multiculturalism and shaping how individuals express identity. The majority of English speakers are non-native (L2) speakers, yet current Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems primarily model…

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models suffer from data scarcity issues as there exists little parallel S2ST data, compared to the amount of data available for conventional cascaded systems that consist of automatic speech…

Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have advanced significantly, aiming to accurately replicate human speech's diversity, including unique speaker identities and linguistic nuances. Despite these advancements, achieving an optimal balance between…

As an indispensable ingredient of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT), automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) plays a pivotal role in aiding self-directed language learners by providing multi-aspect and timely feedback.…

Artificial speech synthesis has made a great leap in terms of naturalness as recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems are capable of producing speech with similar quality to human recordings. However, not all speaking styles are easy to model:…

We propose StyleCap, a method to generate natural language descriptions of speaking styles appearing in speech. Although most of conventional techniques for para-/non-linguistic information recognition focus on the category classification…

Speech errors are a natural part of communication, yet they rarely lead to complete communicative failure because both speakers and comprehenders can detect and correct errors. Although prior research has examined error monitoring and…

Mispronunciation detection is an essential component of the Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. State-of-the-art mispronunciation detection models use Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for acoustic modeling, and a Goodness of…

While there exist strong benchmark datasets for grammatical error correction (GEC), high-quality annotated spoken datasets for Spoken GEC (SGEC) are still under-resourced. In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to generate…

Realistic practice and tailored feedback are key processes for training peer counselors with clinical skills. However, existing mechanisms of providing feedback largely rely on human supervision. Peer counselors often lack mechanisms to…

Evaluating L2 speech intelligibility is crucial for effective computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Conventional ASR-based methods often focus on native-likeness, which may fail to capture the actual intelligibility perceived by human…

Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) improves the accuracy and applicability of multi-speaker ASR systems in real-world scenarios by assigning speaker labels to transcribed texts. However, SA-ASR poses unique challenges…

AI assistance continues to help advance applications in education, from language learning to intelligent tutoring systems, yet current methods for providing students feedback are still quite limited. Most automatic feedback systems either…

The recently developed pitch-controllable text-to-speech (TTS) model, i.e. FastPitch, was conditioned for the pitch contours. However, the quality of the synthesized speech degraded considerably for pitch values that deviated significantly…

Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) seeks to quantify a second language (L2) learner's pronunciation proficiency in a target language by offering timely and fine-grained diagnostic feedback. Most existing efforts on APA have…

Pretrained language models such as BERT, GPT have shown great effectiveness in language understanding. The auxiliary predictive tasks in existing pretraining approaches are mostly defined on tokens, thus may not be able to capture…

This paper presents a new method for training sequence-to-sequence models for speech recognition and translation tasks. Instead of the traditional approach of training models on short segments containing only lowercase or partial…

General-purpose ASR underperforms for atypical speakers, such as L2 learners, reinforcing bias and limiting use in education and accessibility. Using the CEFR-graded Speak and Improve corpus, we show that naive fine-tuning of Whisper…

We explore creating automated, personalized feedback in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). Our goal is to pinpoint correct and incorrect concepts in student answers in order to achieve better student learning gains. Although automatic…