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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2014.6.2.009

Computer-Based Fluency Evaluation of English Speaking Tests for Koreans  

Jang, Byeong-Yong (충북대학교)
Kwon, Oh-Wook (충북대학교)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.6, no.2, 2014 , pp. 9-20 More about this Journal
Abstract
In this paper, we propose an automatic fluency evaluation algorithm for English speaking tests. In the proposed algorithm, acoustic features are extracted from an input spoken utterance and then fluency score is computed by using support vector regression (SVR). We estimate the parameters of feature modeling and SVR using the speech signals and the corresponding scores by human raters. From the correlation analysis results, it is shown that speech rate, articulation rate, and mean length of runs are best for fluency evaluation. Experimental results show that the correlation between the human score and the SVR score is 0.87 for 3 speaking tests, which suggests the possibility of the proposed algorithm as a secondary fluency evaluation tool.
Keywords
speaking fluency; pronunciation; SVR; regression;
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