Speech synthesis for error training models in CALL

Xin Zhang, Qin Lu, Jiping Wan, Guangguang Ma, Tin Shing Chiu, Weiping Ye, Wenli Zhou, Qiao Li

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

A computer assisted pronunciation teaching system (CAPT) is a fundamental component in a computer assisted language learning system (CALL). A speech recognition based CAPT system often requires a large amount of speech data to train the incorrect phone models in its speech recognizer. But collecting incorrectly pronounced speech data is a labor intensive and costly work. This paper reports an effort on training the incorrect phone models by making use of synthesized speech data. A special formant speech synthesizer is designed to filter the correctly pronounced phones into incorrect phones by modifying the formant frequencies. In a Chinese Putonghua CALL system for native Cantonese speakers to learn Mandarin, a small experimental CAPT system is built with a synthetic speech data trained recognizer. Evaluation shows that a CAPT system using synthesized data can perform as good as or even better than that using real data provided that the size of the synthetic data are large enough.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Processing of Oriental Languages
Subtitle of host publicationLanguage Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy - 22nd International Conference, ICCPOL 2009, Proceedings
Pages260-269
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2009
Event22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2009 - , Hong Kong
Duration: 26 Mar 200927 Mar 2009

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5459 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2009
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
Period26/03/0927/03/09

Keywords

  • Computer aided language learning
  • Formant modification
  • Speech synthesis
  • Training data preparation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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