Related papers: Automatic Proficiency Assessment in L2 English Lea…
Automated essay scoring (AES) research often relies on rank-based correlation metrics to validate analytic assessment. However, such metrics obscure both intrinsic intercorrelations among analytic dimensions that arise from the structure of…
As large language models (LLMs) advance in their linguistic capacity, understanding how they capture aspects of language competence remains a significant challenge. This study therefore employs psycholinguistic paradigms in English, which…
Lipreading is an important technique for facilitating human-computer interaction in noisy environments. Our previously developed self-supervised learning method, AV2vec, which leverages multimodal self-distillation, has demonstrated…
Wav2vec 2.0 (W2V2) has shown strong performance in pathological speech analysis by effectively capturing the characteristics of atypical speech. Despite its success, it remains unclear which components of its learned representations are…
Pronunciation assessment and its application in computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) have seen impressive progress in recent years. With the rapid growth in language processing and deep learning over the past few years, there is a…
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…
Evaluating speech intelligibility is a critical task in computer-aided language learning systems. Traditional methods often rely on word error rates (WER) provided by automatic speech recognition (ASR) as intelligibility scores. However,…
This pilot study focuses on a tool called L2L that allows second language (L2) learners to visualise and analyse their Zoom interactions with native speakers. L2L uses the Zoom transcript to automatically generate conversation metrics and…
Assessment of proficiency of the learner is an essential part of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We use Item Response Theory (IRT) in computer-aided language learning for assessment of student ability in two contexts: in test sessions,…
This paper proposes the task of automatic assessment of Sentence Translation Exercises (STEs), that have been used in the early stage of L2 language learning. We formalize the task as grading student responses for each rubric criterion…
We study the usability of pre-trained weakly supervised audio tagging (AT) models as feature extractors for general audio representations. We mainly analyze the feasibility of transferring those embeddings to other tasks within the speech…
In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, Speech2Vec, for learning fixed-length vector representations of audio segments excised from a speech corpus, where the vectors contain semantic information pertaining to…
The detection of perceived prominence in speech has attracted approaches ranging from the design of linguistic knowledge-based acoustic features to the automatic feature learning from suprasegmental attributes such as pitch and intensity…
Expressing natural language descriptions of structured facts or relations -- data-to-text generation (D2T) -- increases the accessibility of structured knowledge repositories. Previous work shows that pre-trained language models(PLMs)…
The use of large pretrained neural networks to create contextualized word embeddings has drastically improved performance on several natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These computationally expensive models have begun to be applied to…
Our native language influences the way we perceive speech sounds, affecting our ability to discriminate non-native sounds. We compare two ideas about the influence of the native language on speech perception: the Perceptual Assimilation…
Recent findings show that pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models are reliable feature extractors for various speaker characteristics classification tasks. We show that latent representations extracted at different layers of a pre-trained wav2vec…
Direct acoustics-to-word (A2W) models in the end-to-end paradigm have received increasing attention compared to conventional sub-word based automatic speech recognition models using phones, characters, or context-dependent hidden Markov…
Text-based open-ended questions in academic formative and summative assessments help students become deep learners and prepare them to understand concepts for a subsequent conceptual assessment. However, grading text-based questions,…
Prosodic boundaries in speech are of great relevance to both speech synthesis and audio annotation. In this paper, we apply the wav2vec 2.0 framework to the task of detecting these boundaries in speech signal, using only acoustic…