TY - GEN
T1 - Speech synthesis for error training models in CALL
AU - Zhang, Xin
AU - Lu, Qin
AU - Wan, Jiping
AU - Ma, Guangguang
AU - Chiu, Tin Shing
AU - Ye, Weiping
AU - Zhou, Wenli
AU - Li, Qiao
PY - 2009/11/9
Y1 - 2009/11/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Computer aided language learning
KW - Formant modification
KW - Speech synthesis
KW - Training data preparation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70350645499&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_24
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_24
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
SN - 3642008305
SN - 9783642008306
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 260
EP - 269
BT - Computer Processing of Oriental Languages
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2009
Y2 - 26 March 2009 through 27 March 2009
ER -