Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets



Coutinho, E ORCID: 0000-0001-5234-1497, Hönig, F, Zhang, Y, Hantke, S, Batliner, A, Nöth, E and Schuller, B
(2016) Assessing the Prosody of Non-Native Speakers of English: Measures and Feature Sets. In: Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), 2016-5-23 - 2016-5-28, Portorož, Slovenia.

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new database with audio recordings of non-native (L2) speakers of English, and the perceptual evaluation experiment conducted with native English speakers for assessing the prosody of each recording. These annotations are then used to compute the gold standard using different methods, and a series of regression experiments is conducted to evaluate their impact on the performance of a regression model predicting the degree of Abstract naturalness of L2 speech. Further, we compare the relevance of different feature groups modelling prosody in general (without speech tempo), speech rate and pauses modelling speech tempo (fluency), voice quality, and a variety of spectral features. We also discuss the impact of various fusion strategies on performance.Overall, our results demonstrate that the prosody of non-native speakers of English as L2 can be reliably assessed using supra- segmental audio features; prosodic features seem to be the most important ones.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 24 May 2016 09:43
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 07:37
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3000583