Abstract
Aiming at automatic estimation of naturalness in timing control of non-native's speech, we have analyzed the timing characteristics of non-native's speech to correlate with corresponding subjective naturalness evaluation scores given by native speakers. In addition to word level statistical characteristics showing the differences between natives and non-natives, we analyzed phone and syllable level statistics to attain an objective measure better fit to natives' judgments. An English speech corpus spoken by Japanese was collected with temporal naturalness judgments by natives. The analysis results showed that timing differences between natives and non-natives in average syllable durations, weak vowel durations and vowel duration of function words were highly correlated with natives' naturalness evaluations. A liner regression model and a regression tree model were employed to estimate naturalness evaluation score from differences between native's speech and non-natives one. The proposed naturalness evaluation model was tested its estimation accuracy using open data. The root mean square errors between predicted scores by the two models and scores given by the natives turned out to be 0.63 and 0.66 comparable to the differences 0.70 of scores among native listeners respectively. These accuracies were better than one estimated by the model using word statistics only.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004 |
| Publisher | International Speech Communication Association |
| Pages | 1673-1676 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2004 |
| Event | 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004 - Jeju, Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of Duration: 2004 Oct 4 → 2004 Oct 8 |
Other
| Other | 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004 |
|---|---|
| Country | Korea, Republic of |
| City | Jeju, Jeju Island |
| Period | 04/10/4 → 04/10/8 |
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ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
Cite this
Analysis of the phone level contributions to objective evaluation of english speech by non-natives. / Suzuki, Yasuo; Muto, Makiko; Shirai, Katsuhiko; Sagisaka, Yoshinori.
8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004. International Speech Communication Association, 2004. p. 1673-1676.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Analysis of the phone level contributions to objective evaluation of english speech by non-natives
AU - Suzuki, Yasuo
AU - Muto, Makiko
AU - Shirai, Katsuhiko
AU - Sagisaka, Yoshinori
PY - 2004
Y1 - 2004
N2 - Aiming at automatic estimation of naturalness in timing control of non-native's speech, we have analyzed the timing characteristics of non-native's speech to correlate with corresponding subjective naturalness evaluation scores given by native speakers. In addition to word level statistical characteristics showing the differences between natives and non-natives, we analyzed phone and syllable level statistics to attain an objective measure better fit to natives' judgments. An English speech corpus spoken by Japanese was collected with temporal naturalness judgments by natives. The analysis results showed that timing differences between natives and non-natives in average syllable durations, weak vowel durations and vowel duration of function words were highly correlated with natives' naturalness evaluations. A liner regression model and a regression tree model were employed to estimate naturalness evaluation score from differences between native's speech and non-natives one. The proposed naturalness evaluation model was tested its estimation accuracy using open data. The root mean square errors between predicted scores by the two models and scores given by the natives turned out to be 0.63 and 0.66 comparable to the differences 0.70 of scores among native listeners respectively. These accuracies were better than one estimated by the model using word statistics only.
AB - Aiming at automatic estimation of naturalness in timing control of non-native's speech, we have analyzed the timing characteristics of non-native's speech to correlate with corresponding subjective naturalness evaluation scores given by native speakers. In addition to word level statistical characteristics showing the differences between natives and non-natives, we analyzed phone and syllable level statistics to attain an objective measure better fit to natives' judgments. An English speech corpus spoken by Japanese was collected with temporal naturalness judgments by natives. The analysis results showed that timing differences between natives and non-natives in average syllable durations, weak vowel durations and vowel duration of function words were highly correlated with natives' naturalness evaluations. A liner regression model and a regression tree model were employed to estimate naturalness evaluation score from differences between native's speech and non-natives one. The proposed naturalness evaluation model was tested its estimation accuracy using open data. The root mean square errors between predicted scores by the two models and scores given by the natives turned out to be 0.63 and 0.66 comparable to the differences 0.70 of scores among native listeners respectively. These accuracies were better than one estimated by the model using word statistics only.
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M3 - Conference contribution
SP - 1673
EP - 1676
BT - 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2004
PB - International Speech Communication Association
ER -