Abstract
A computer assisted pronunciation teaching system (CAPT) is a fundamental component in a computer assisted language learning system (CALL). A speech recognition based CAPT system often requires a large amount of speech data to train the incorrect phone models in its speech recognizer. But collecting incorrectly pronounced speech data is a labor intensive and costly work. This paper reports an effort on training the incorrect phone models by making use of synthesized speech data. A special formant speech synthesizer is designed to filter the correctly pronounced phones into incorrect phones by modifying the formant frequencies. In a Chinese Putonghua CALL system for native Cantonese speakers to learn Mandarin, a small experimental CAPT system is built with a synthetic speech data trained recognizer. Evaluation shows that a CAPT system using synthesized data can perform as good as or even better than that using real data provided that the size of the synthetic data are large enough.
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Zhang, X. et al. (2009). Speech Synthesis for Error Training Models in CALL. In: Li, W., Mollá-Aliod, D. (eds) Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy. ICCPOL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5459. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00831-3_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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