Industrial Technology Research Institute

Che-Yao Yang

Chih-Chung Kuo

Miao-Ru Hsu

Ke-Shiu Chen

A method and system for pronunciation assessment based on distinctive feature analysis is provided. It evaluates a user's pronunciation by one or more distinctive feature (DF) assessor. It may further construct a phone assessor with DF assessors to evaluate a user's phone pronunciation, and even construct a continuous speech pronunciation assessor with phone assessor to get the final pronunciation score for a word or a sentence. Each DF assessor further includes a feature extractor and a distinctive feature classifier, and can be realized differently. This is based on the different characteristic of the distinctive feature. A score mapper may be included to standardize the output for each DF assessor. Each speech phone can be described as a 'bundle' of DFs. The invention is a novel and qualitative solution based on the DF of speech sounds for pronunciation assessment.

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Pingtung, Taiwan

Che-Yao Yang