Automatic scoring of prosody in English learner's speech based on utterance comparison

摘要

This paper describes methods of automatic scoring by comparing two utterances for supporting language learning. We tried four methods for matching two utterances. The best result was derived from the matching method based on the automatic labeling with English phoneme models and Japanese phoneme models. We examined the correlation between evaluation scores by English teachers and by computer. There were little differences between four methods of the automatic scoring by computer, and the correlation between teachers' scores and computer's scores was very weak. We also proposed a method for weighting words in a sentence for automatic scoring of learner's speech.