Pronunciation similarity estimation for spoken language learning

  • Authors:
  • Donghyun Kim;Dongsuk Yook

  • Affiliations:
  • Speech Information Processing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea;Speech Information Processing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • ICCPOL'06 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages: beyond the orient: the research challenges ahead
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach for estimating pronunciation similarity between two speakers using the cepstral distance. General speech recognition systems have been used to find the matched words of a speaker, using the acoustical score of a speech signal and the grammatical score of a word sequence. In the case of learning a language, for a speaker with impaired hearing, it is not easy to estimate the pronunciation similarity using automatic speech recognition systems, as this requires more information of pronouncing characteristics, than information on word matching. This is a new challenge for computer aided pronunciation learning. The dynamic time warping algorithm is used for cepstral distance computation between two speech data with codebook distance subtracted to consider the characteristics of each speaker. The experiments evaluated on the Korean fundamental vowel set show that the similarity of two speaker's pronunciation can be efficiently computed using computers.