Related papers: Automated evaluation of children's speech fluency …
Level assessment for foreign language students is necessary for putting them in the right level group, furthermore, interviewing students is a very time-consuming task, so we propose to automate the evaluation of speaker fluency level by…
Literacy assessment is an important activity for education administrators across the globe. Typically achieved in a school setting by testing a child's oral reading, it is intensive in human resources. While automatic speech recognition…
In this paper, we propose a self-training approach for automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource settings. While self-training approaches have been extensively developed and evaluated for high-resource languages such as English,…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used in applications involving child speech, such as language learning and literacy acquisition. However, the effectiveness of such applications is limited by high ASR error rates. The…
This paper reports on a set of three recent experiments utilizing large-scale speech models to evaluate the oral reading fluency (ORF) of students in Ghana. While ORF is a well-established measure of foundational literacy, assessing it…
Background: Speech and language pathologists (SLPs) often relyon judgements of speech fluency for diagnosing or monitoringpatients with aphasia. However, such subjective methods havebeen criticised for their lack of reliability and their…
Fluency is a crucial goal of all Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Widely used automatic evaluation metrics fall short in capturing the fluency of machine-generated text. Assessing the fluency of NLG systems poses a challenge since…
Developing narrative and comprehension skills in early childhood is critical for later literacy. However, teachers in large preschool classrooms struggle to accurately identify students who require intervention. We present a system for…
This paper addresses automatic quality assessment of spoken language translation (SLT). This relatively new task is defined and formalized as a sequence labeling problem where each word in the SLT hypothesis is tagged as good or bad…
This paper presents a novel multistage fine-tuning strategy designed to enhance automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance in low-resource languages using OpenAI's Whisper model. In this approach we aim to build ASR model for languages…
This work investigates two strategies for zero-shot non-intrusive speech assessment leveraging large language models. First, we explore the audio analysis capabilities of GPT-4o. Second, we propose GPT-Whisper, which uses Whisper as an…
The development of resource-constrained approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR) is of great interest due to its broad applicability to many low-resource languages for which there is scant usable data. Existing approaches to many…
Speech synthesis technology has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, enabling the creation of natural and expressive synthetic speech. One area of particular interest is the generation of synthetic child speech, which…
Child literacy is a strong predictor of life outcomes at the subsequent stages of an individual's life. This points to a need for targeted interventions in vulnerable low and middle income populations to help bridge the gap between literacy…
Reading fluency assessment is a critical component of literacy programmes, serving to guide and monitor early education interventions. Given the resource intensive nature of the exercise when conducted by teachers, the development of…
We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been an essential component of computer assisted language learning (CALL) and computer assisted language testing (CALT) for many years. As this technology continues to develop rapidly, it is important…
Automatic pronunciation assessment is an important technology to help self-directed language learners. While pronunciation quality has multiple aspects including accuracy, fluency, completeness, and prosody, previous efforts typically only…
We explore an ASR-free method for isolated word reading assessment in low-resource settings. Our few-shot approach compares input child speech to a small set of adult-provided reference templates. Inputs and templates are encoded using…
Speech processing techniques are useful for analyzing speech and language development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who are often varied and delayed in acquiring these skills. Early identification and intervention are…