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Register a new userImproving pronunciation assessment via ordinal regression with anchored reference samples
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Sentence level pronunciation assessment is important for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Traditional speech pronunciation assessment, based on the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm, has some weakness in assessing a speech utterance: 1) Phoneme GOP scores cannot be easily translated into a sentence score with a simple average for effective assessment; 2) The rank ordering information has not been well exploited in GOP scoring for delivering a robust assessment and correlate well with a human raters evaluations. In this paper, we propose two new statistical features, average GOP (aGOP) and confusion GOP (cGOP) and use them to train a binary classifier in Ordinal Regression with Anchored Reference Samples (ORARS). When the proposed approach is tested on Microsoft mTutor ESL Dataset, a relative improvement of Pearson correlation coefficient of 26.9% is obtained over the conventional GOP-based one. The performance is at a human-parity level or better than human raters.
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Most of the pronunciation assessment methods are based on local features derived from automatic speech recognition (ASR), e.g., the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) score. In this paper, we investigate an ASR-free scoring approach that is derived from the marginal distribution of raw speech signals. The hypothesis is that even if we have no knowledge of the language (so cannot recognize the phones/words), we can still tell how good a pronunciation is, by comparatively listening to some speech data from the target language. Our analysis shows that this new scoring approach provides an interesting correction for the phone-competition problem of GOP. Experimental results on the ERJ dataset demonstrated that combining the ASR-free score and GOP can achieve better performance than the GOP baseline.
Background: The inability to test at scale has become humanitys Achilles heel in the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic. A scalable screening tool would be a game changer. Building on the prior work on cough-based diagnosis of respiratory diseases, we propose, develop and test an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered screening solution for COVID-19 infection that is deployable via a smartphone app. The app, named AI4COVID-19 records and sends three 3-second cough sounds to an AI engine running in the cloud, and returns a result within two minutes. Methods: Cough is a symptom of over thirty non-COVID-19 related medical conditions. This makes the diagnosis of a COVID-19 infection by cough alone an extremely challenging multidisciplinary problem. We address this problem by investigating the distinctness of pathomorphological alterations in the respiratory system induced by COVID-19 infection when compared to other respiratory infections. To overcome the COVID-19 cough training data shortage we exploit transfer learning. To reduce the misdiagnosis risk stemming from the complex dimensionality of the problem, we leverage a multi-pronged mediator centered risk-averse AI architecture. Results: Results show AI4COVID-19 can distinguish among COVID-19 coughs and several types of non-COVID-19 coughs. The accuracy is promising enough to encourage a large-scale collection of labeled cough data to gauge the generalization capability of AI4COVID-19. AI4COVID-19 is not a clinical grade testing tool. Instead, it offers a screening tool deployable anytime, anywhere, by anyone. It can also be a clinical decision assistance tool used to channel clinical-testing and treatment to those who need it the most, thereby saving more lives.
Spoken language identification (LID) technologies have improved in recent years from discriminating largely distinct languages to discriminating highly similar languages or even dialects of the same language. One aspect that has been mostly neglected, however, is discrimination of languages for multilingual speakers, despite being a primary target audience of many systems that utilize LID technologies. As we show in this work, LID systems can have a high average accuracy for most combinations of languages while greatly underperforming for others when accented speech is present. We address this by using coarser-grained targets for the acoustic LID model and integrating its outputs with interaction context signals in a context-aware model to tailor the system to each user. This combined system achieves an average 97% accuracy across all language combinations while improving worst-case accuracy by over 60% relative to our baseline.
Automatic speech quality assessment is an important, transversal task whose progress is hampered by the scarcity of human annotations, poor generalization to unseen recording conditions, and a lack of flexibility of existing approaches. In this work, we tackle these problems with a semi-supervised learning approach, combining available annotations with programmatically generated data, and using 3 different optimization criteria together with 5 complementary auxiliary tasks. Our results show that such a semi-supervised approach can cut the error of existing methods by more than 36%, while providing additional benefits in terms of reusable features or auxiliary outputs. Improvement is further corroborated with an out-of-sample test showing promising generalization capabilities.
Despite prosody is related to the linguistic information up to the discourse structure, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems only take into account that within each sentence, which makes it challenging when converting a paragraph of texts into natural and expressive speech. In this paper, we propose to use the text embeddings of the neighboring sentences to improve the prosody generation for each utterance of a paragraph in an end-to-end fashion without using any explicit prosody features. More specifically, cross-utterance (CU) context vectors, which are produced by an additional CU encoder based on the sentence embeddings extracted by a pre-trained BERT model, are used to augment the input of the Tacotron2 decoder. Two types of BERT embeddings are investigated, which leads to the use of different CU encoder structures. Experimental results on a Mandarin audiobook dataset and the LJ-Speech English audiobook dataset demonstrate the use of CU information can improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech. Subjective listening testing shows most of the participants prefer the voice generated using the CU encoder over that generated using standard Tacotron2. It is also found that the prosody can be controlled indirectly by changing the neighbouring sentences.
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