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Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) analyzes second-language (L2) learners' speech by providing fine-grained pronunciation feedback at various linguistic levels. Most existing efforts on APA typically adopt segmental-level features as…
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…
Public speaking and presentation competence plays an essential role in many areas of social interaction in our educational, professional, and everyday life. Since our intention during a speech can differ from what is actually understood by…
Current automated speaking assessment (ASA) systems for use in multi-aspect evaluations often fail to make full use of content relevance, overlooking image or exemplar cues, and employ superficial grammar analysis that lacks detailed error…
Automatic pronunciation assessment is typically performed by acoustic models trained on audio-score pairs. Although effective, these systems provide only numerical scores, without the information needed to help learners understand their…
Pronunciation assessment models designed for open response scenarios enable users to practice language skills in a manner similar to real-life communication. However, previous open-response pronunciation assessment models have predominantly…
This paper explores the critical but often overlooked role of non-verbal cues, including co-speech gestures and facial expressions, in human communication and their implications for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We argue that…
We propose a novel non-parametric/un-trainable language model, named Non-Parametric Pairwise Attention Random Walk Model (NoPPA), to generate sentence embedding only with pre-trained word embedding and pre-counted word frequency. To the…
Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for human examiners, aiming to determine whether large language…
Speech enhancement is a critical component of many user-oriented audio applications, yet current systems still suffer from distorted and unnatural outputs. While generative models have shown strong potential in speech synthesis, they are…
In this paper, we have introduced and evaluated intonation based feature for scoring the English speech of nonnative English speakers in Indian context. For this, we created an automated spoken English scoring engine to learn from the…
Automatic Pronunciation Assessment (APA) plays a vital role in Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) when evaluating a second language (L2) learner's speaking proficiency. However, an apparent downside of most de facto methods is…
Recently, pre-trained models with phonetic supervision have demonstrated their advantages for crosslingual speech recognition in data efficiency and information sharing across languages. However, a limitation is that a pronunciation lexicon…
Although much work in NLP has focused on measuring and mitigating stereotypical bias in semantic spaces, research addressing bias in computational argumentation is still in its infancy. In this paper, we address this research gap and…
Non-intrusive assessment of speech quality and intelligibility is essential when clean reference signals are unavailable. In this work, we propose a multimodal framework that integrates audio features and visual cues to predict PESQ and…
This research presents a novel approach to enhancing automatic speech recognition systems by integrating noise detection capabilities directly into the recognition architecture. Building upon the wav2vec2 framework, the proposed method…
The relationship between written and spoken words is convoluted in languages with a deep orthography such as English and therefore it is difficult to devise explicit rules for generating the pronunciations for unseen words. Pronunciation by…
We analyse the cross-lingual transferability of a dialogue evaluation framework that assesses the relationships between micro-level linguistic features (e.g. backchannels) and macro-level interactivity labels (e.g. topic management),…
The perceptual task of speech quality assessment (SQA) is a challenging task for machines to do. Objective SQA methods that rely on the availability of the corresponding clean reference have been the primary go-to approaches for SQA.…
Pronunciation assessment is a major challenge in the computer-aided pronunciation training system, especially at the word (phoneme)-level. To obtain word (phoneme)-level scores, current methods usually rely on aligning components to obtain…