Related papers: Automatic Proficiency Assessment in L2 English Lea…

Achieving pronunciation proficiency in a second language (L2) remains a challenge, despite the development of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. Traditional CAPT systems often provide unintuitive feedback that lacks…

Representation learning from unlabeled data has been of major interest in artificial intelligence research. While self-supervised speech representation learning has been popular in the speech research community, very few works have…

This report proposes state-of-the-art research in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Mispronunciation detection is one of the core components of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems which is a subset…

Automatic detection and severity level classification of dysarthria directly from acoustic speech signals can be used as a tool in medical diagnosis. In this work, the pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 model is studied as a feature extractor to build…

Creating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems that are robust and resilient to classroom conditions is paramount to the development of AI tools to aid teachers and students. In this work, we study the efficacy of continued pretraining…

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…

Data-driven models achieve successful results in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, these models, which are often based on general acoustic features or end-to-end approaches, show poor performance when the testing set has a…

This paper explores the use of Dutch archival television broadcast data for self-supervised learning of speech foundation models, specifically wav2vec 2.0. We first study data quality assumptions for pre-training, and show how music, noise…

This study is focused on understanding and quantifying the change in phoneme and prosody information encoded in the Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) model, brought by an accent identification (AID) fine-tuning task. This problem is addressed…

Reliable and interpretable automated assessment of second-language (L2) speech remains a central challenge, as large speech-language models (SpeechLLMs) often struggle to align with the nuanced variability of human raters. To address this,…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently reshaped Automated Essay Scoring (AES), yet prior studies typically examine individual techniques in isolation, limiting understanding of their relative merits for English as a Second Language (L2)…

Nowadays, research in speech technologies has gotten a lot out thanks to recently created public domain corpora that contain thousands of recording hours. These large amounts of data are very helpful for training the new complex models…

The writing examples of English language learners may be different from those of native speakers. Given that there is a significant differences in second language (L2) learners' error types by their proficiency levels, this paper attempts…

This paper deals with multi-lingual dialogue act (DA) recognition. The proposed approaches are based on deep neural networks and use word2vec embeddings for word representation. Two multi-lingual models are proposed for this task. The first…

Despite the centrality of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) to bilingualism research, human studies often yield conflicting results due to inherent experimental variance. We address these inconsistencies by using language models (LMs) as…

Deep learning models for automatic readability assessment generally discard linguistic features traditionally used in machine learning models for the task. We propose to incorporate linguistic features into neural network models by learning…

Assessment of children's speaking fluency in education is well researched for majority languages, but remains highly challenging for low resource languages. This paper proposes a system to automatically assess fluency by combining a…

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…

We investigate recent transformer networks pre-trained for automatic speech recognition for their ability to detect speaker and language changes in speech. We do this by simply adding speaker (change) or language targets to the labels. For…

We investigate robustness properties of pre-trained neural models for automatic speech recognition. Real life data in machine learning is usually very noisy and almost never clean, which can be attributed to various factors depending on the…