Modern technologies in teaching FLT — страница 5

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laboratory systems that participated in the WSJ large-vocabulary continuous dictation task have achieved word error rates as low as 5%, that is, on average, one recognition error in every twenty words (Pallet, 1994). CURRENT TRENDS IN VOICE-INTERACTIVE CALL In recent years, an increasing number of speech laboratories have begun deploying speech technology in CALL applications. Results include voice-interactive prototype systems for teaching pronunciation, reading, and limited conversational skills in semi-constrained contexts. Our review of these applications is far from exhaustive. It covers a select number of mostly experimental systems that explore paths we found promising and worth pursuing. We will discuss the range of voice-interactions these systems offer for practicing

certain language skills, explain their technical implementation, and comment on the pedagogical value of these implementations. Apart from giving a brief system overview, we report experimental results if available and provide an assessment of how far away the technology is from being deployed in the commercial and educational environments. Pronunciation Training A useful and remarkably successful application of speech recognition and processing technology has been demonstrated by a number of research and commercial laboratories in the area of pronunciation training. Voice-interactive pronunciation tutors prompt students to repeat spoken words and phrases or to read aloud sentences in the target language for the purpose of practicing both the sounds and the intonation of the

language. The key to teaching pronunciation successfully is corrective feedback, more specifically, a type of feedback that does not rely on the student's own perception. A number of experimental systems have implemented automatic pronunciation scoring as a means to evaluate spoken learner productions in terms of fluency, segmental quality (phonemes) and supra-segmental features (intonation). The automatically generated proficiency score can then be used as a basis for providing other modes of corrective feedback. We discuss segmental and supra-segmental feedback in more detail below. Segmental Feedback. Technically, designing a voice-interactive pronunciation tutor goes beyond the state of the art required by commercial dictation systems. While the grammar and vocabulary of a

pronunciation tutor is comparatively simple, the underlying speech processing technology tends to be complex since it must be customized to recognize and evaluate the disfluent speech of language learners. A conventional speech recognizer is designed to generate the most charitable reading of a speaker's utterance. Acoustic models are generalized so as to accept and recognize correctly a wide range of different accents and pronunciations. A pronunciation tutor, by contrast, must be trained to both recognize and correct subtle deviations from standard native pronunciations. A number of techniques have been suggested for automatic recognition and scoring of non-native speech (Bernstein, 1997; Franco, Neumeyer, Kim, & Ronen, 1997; Kim, Franco, & Neumeyer, 1997; Witt &

Young, 1997). In general terms, the procedure consists of building native pronunciation models and then measuring the non-native responses against the native models. This requires models trained on both native and non-native speech data in the target language, and supplemented by a set of algorithms for measuring acoustic variables that have proven useful in distinguishing native from non-native speech. These variables include response latency, segment duration, inter-word pauses (in phrases), spectral likelihood, and fundamental frequency (F0). Machine scores are calculated from statistics derived from comparing non-native values for these variables to the native models. In a final step, machine generated pronunciation scores are validated by correlating these scores with the

judgment of human expert listeners. As one would expect, the accuracy of scores increases with the duration of the utterance to be evaluated. Stanford Research Institute (SRI) has demonstrated a 0.44 correlation between machine scores and human scores at the phone level. At the sentence level, the machine-human correlation was 0.58, and at the speaker level it was 0.72 for a total of 50 utterances per speaker (Franco et al., 1997; Kim et al., 1997). These results compare with 0.55, 0.65, and 0.80 for phone, utterance, and speaker level correlation between human graders. A study conducted at Entropic shows that based on about 20 to 30 utterances per speaker and on a linear combination of the above techniques, it is possible to obtain machine-human grader correlation levels as high