The Complementary Role of Para-linguistic cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment

Yassine El Kheir, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Ahmed Ali


Abstract
Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic and phonological aspects of non-native (L2) speech, often neglecting the rich layer of information hidden within the para-linguistic cues. In this study, we proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, IntraVerbalPA.[The source code will be available to the public upon acceptance.] The framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract utterance-level para-linguistic cues, alongside the raw speech and phoneme representations. Additionally, we introduce the “Goodness of phonemic-duration” metric to model phoneme duration distribution within the framework effectively. Our results validate the effectiveness of the proposed IntraVerbalPA framework and its individual components, yielding performance that matches or outperforms existing research works.
Anthology ID:
2026.iwsds-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology
Month:
February
Year:
2026
Address:
Trento, Italy
Editors:
Giuseppe Riccardi, Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Maria Ines Torres, Koichiro Yoshino, Zoraida Callejas, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Yun-Nung Chen, Frederic Bechet, Joakim Gustafson, Géraldine Damnati, Alex Papangelis, Luis Fernando D’Haro, John Mendonça, Raffaella Bernardi, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Giuseppe "Pino" Di Fabbrizio, Tatsuya Kawahara, Firoj Alam, Gokhan Tur, Michael Johnston
Venue:
IWSDS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
302–306
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.30/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yassine El Kheir, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Ahmed Ali. 2026. The Complementary Role of Para-linguistic cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, pages 302–306, Trento, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Complementary Role of Para-linguistic cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment (El Kheir et al., IWSDS 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.30.pdf