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Towards Automatic F luency Assessment. Suma Bhat. The Problem. Fluency – subjective quantity Design of right quantifiers critical Measurement of the quantifiers required Problem: Automatic Assessment. Problem is Hard. Fluency Subjective quantity Not readily measurable
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Towards Automatic Fluency Assessment Suma Bhat
The Problem • Fluency – subjective quantity • Design of right quantifiers critical • Measurement of the quantifiers required • Problem: Automatic Assessment
Problem is Hard • Fluency • Subjective quantity • Not readily measurable • More than just the opposite of disfluency • Key: design of good quantifiers
Previous Work • Main work by Cucchiarini et al. • Quantitative assessment of fluency in speech possible • Measure quantifiers of syllable rate and frequency of pauses • Use of ASR
Our Work • Previous work used language specific training data to build ASR • Our focus: low-level acoustic measurements • Our thesis: Low level acoustic variables are good quantifiers of fluency
Experiments • Start with speech signal • View acoustic data at a coarse level • Syllables well represented by corresponding vocalic nuclei • Vocalic nucleiand silent pauses can be detected automatically • Goal: correlate with human judgment
Data • Data from rated assessment • Classroom recording of 2nd language Chinese speech • 20s snippets rated for Speech Flow Phonological Control Lexical Accuracy Disfluency Delivery Skills Fluency • Fluency most correlated with Speech Flow,Disfluency
dur1=duration of speech without silent pauses dur2= total duration of speech Assessment of Fluency Speech Flow Disfluency
Acoustic Measurements • Downsample to 16K • Use intensity information • Segment utterance into regions of speech and silence • silent pause related information • Detect vocalic regions in the speech segments • syllable related information
Conclusion • Key Acoustic Features • PhonationTime ratiomost positively correlated with Speech Flow • Frequency of silent pausesmost negatively correlated with Speech Flow • Summary: Quantifiers obtained by low-level acoustic measurements useful for non-rated assessment
Looking Ahead • Measurements on more rated speech • Detection of filled pause • Look for additional quantifiers • Poor pronunciation • vocabulary richness • Automatic classification of fluency