Language proficiency assessment of English L2 speakers based on joint analysis of prosody and native language

Yue Zhang, Felix Weninger, Anton Batliner, Bjorn Schuller, Florian Honig

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this work, wc present an in-depth analysis of the intcr- dcpcndcncy between the non-native prosody and the native language (LI) of English L2 speakers, as separately investigated in the Degree of Nativcncss Task and the Native Language Task of the INTERSPEECH 2015 and 2016 Computational Paralinguistics ChallcngE (ComParE). To this end, wc propose a multi-Task learning scheme based on auxiliary attributes for jointly learning the tasks of L1 classification and prosody score regression. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated in extensive experimental runs, comparing various standardised feature sets of prosodic, ccpstral, spectral, and voice quality descriptors, as well as automatic feature selection. In the result, we show that the prediction of both prosody score and L1 can be improved by considering both tasks in a holistic way. In particular, wc achieve an 11 % relative gain in regression performance (Spearman's correlation coefficient) on prosody scores, when comparing the best multi-And single-Task learning results.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICMI 2016 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
EditorsCatherine Pelachaud, Yukiko I. Nakano, Toyoaki Nishida, Carlos Busso, Louis-Philippe Morency, Elisabeth Andre
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages274-278
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450345569
DOIs
StatePublished - 31 Oct 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2016 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: 12 Nov 201616 Nov 2016

Publication series

NameICMI 2016 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction

Conference

Conference18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2016
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period12/11/1616/11/16

Keywords

  • Feature evaluation
  • L1 identification
  • Non-native prosody

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