The SRI EduSpeakTM System: Recognition and Pronunciation Scoring for Language Learning

The EduSpeak TM system is a software development toolkit t hat enables developers of interactive language education software to use state-of-the-art speech recognition and p ronunciation scoring technology. We first report results on the a pplication of adaptation techniques to recognize both n ative a nd nonnative speech in a speaker-independent manner. We discuss our pronunciation scoring paradigm and show experimental results in the form of correlations between the pronunciation quality estimators included in the toolkit and grades given by human listeners. We review phone-level pronunciation estimation schemes and describe the phone-level mispronunciation detection functionality that we have incorporated in the toolkit. Finally, we mention some of the EduSpeakTM toolkit system features that facilitate the creation and deployment of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications.