Automatic evaluation of spoken fluency

US8457967B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Nuance Communications, Inc. · US

Inventors

• Kartik Audhkhasi · White Plains, US
• Om D. Deshmukh · Savanuru, IN
• Kundan Kandhway · Chennai, IN
• Ashish Verma · New Delhi, IN

Key dates

• Filing date: Aug 15, 2009
• Grant date: Jun 4, 2013
• Expiry date: Apr 4, 2032

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G09B19/04
• WIPO field: Control
• WIPO sector: Instruments

Abstract

A procedure to automatically evaluate the spoken fluency of a speaker by prompting the speaker to talk on a given topic, recording the speaker's speech to get a recorded sample of speech, and then analyzing the patterns of disfluencies in the speech to compute a numerical score to quantify the spoken fluency skills of the speakers. The numerical fluency score accounts for various prosodic and lexical features, including formant-based filled-pause detection, closely-occurring exact and inexact repeat N-grams, normalized average distance between consecutive occurrences of N-grams. The lexical features and prosodic features are combined to classify the speaker with a C-class classification and develop a rating for the speaker.