Method and apparatus for automatic text-independent grading of pronunciation for language instruction
US6055498A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Oct 2, 1997 |
| Grant date | Apr 25, 2000 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Oct 2, 2017 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG10L15/26
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
Pronunciation quality is automatically evaluated for an utterance of speech based on one or more pronunciation scores. One type of pronunciation score is based on duration of acoustic units. Examples of acoustic units include phones and syllables. Another type of pronunciation score is based on a posterior probability that a piece of input speech corresponds to a certain model, such as a hidden Markov model, given the piece of input speech. Speech may be segmented into phones and syllable for evaluation with respect to the models. The utterance of speech may be an arbitrary utterance made up of a sequence of words which had not been encountered before. Pronunciation scores are converted into grades as would be assigned by human graders. Pronunciation quality may be evaluated in a client-server language instruction environment.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.