MAT: a tool for L2 pronunciation errors annotation

Renlong Ai, Marcela Charfuelan


Abstract
In the area of Computer Assisted Language Learning(CALL), second language (L2) learners’ spoken data is an important resource for analysing and annotating typical L2 pronunciation errors. The annotation of L2 pronunciation errors in spoken data is not an easy task though, normally it requires manual annotation from trained linguists or phoneticians. In order to facilitate this task, in this paper, we present the MAT tool, a web-based tool intended to facilitate the annotation of L2 learners’ pronunciation errors at various levels. The tool has been designed taking into account recent studies on error detection in pronunciation training. It also aims at providing an easy and fast annotation process via a comprehensive and friendly user interface. The tool is based on the MARY TTS open source platform, from which it uses the components: text analyser (tokeniser, syllabifier, phonemiser), phonetic aligner and speech signal processor. Annotation results at sentence, word, syllable and phoneme levels are stored in XML format. The tool is currently under evaluation with a L2 learners’ spoken corpus recorded in the SPRINTER (Language Technology for Interactive, Multi-Media Online Language Learning) project.
Anthology ID:
L14-1730
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/971_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Renlong Ai and Marcela Charfuelan. 2014. MAT: a tool for L2 pronunciation errors annotation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
MAT: a tool for L2 pronunciation errors annotation (Ai & Charfuelan, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/971_Paper.pdf