Automatic detection of mispronunciation for language instruction

Abstract

This work is part of a project aimed at developing a speech recognition system for language instruction that can assess the quality of pronunciation, identify pronunciation problems, and provide the student with accurate feedback about specific mistakes. Previous work was mainly concerned with scoring the quality of pronunciation. In this work we focus on automatic detection of mispronunciation. While scoring quantifies the mispronunciation, detection identifies the occurrence of a specific problem. Detecting pronunciation problems is necessary for providing feedback to the student. We use pronunciation scoring techniques to evaluate the performance of our mispronunciation model.