Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) manages to quantify a second language (L2) learner’s pronunciation proficiency in a target language by providing fine-grained feedback with multiple pronunciation aspect scores at various linguistic levels. Most existing efforts on APA typically parallelize the modeling process, namely predicting multiple aspect scores across various linguistic levels simultaneously. This inevitably makes both the hierarchy of linguistic units and the relatedness among the pronunciation aspects sidelined. Recognizing such a limitation, we in this paper first introduce HierTFR, a hierarchal APA method that jointly models the intrinsic structures of an utterance while considering the relatedness among the pronunciation aspects. We also propose a correlation-aware regularizer to strengthen the connection between the estimated scores and the human annotations. Furthermore, novel pre-training strategies tailored for different linguistic levels are put forward so as to facilitate better model initialization. An extensive set of empirical experiments conducted on the speechocean762 benchmark dataset suggest the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach in relation to several competitive baselines.

The goal of an information retrieval system is to retrieve documents that are most relevant to a given user query from a huge collection of documents, which usually requires time-consuming multiple comparisons between the query and candidate documents so as to find the most relevant ones. Recently, a novel retrieval modeling approach, dubbed Differentiable Search Index (DSI), has been proposed. DSI dramatically simplifies the whole retrieval process by encoding all information about the document collection into the parameter space of a single Transformer model, on top of which DSI can in turn generate the relevant document identities (IDs) in an autoregressive manner in response to a user query. Although DSI addresses the shortcomings of traditional retrieval systems, previous studies have pointed out that DSI might fail to retrieve relevant documents because DSI uses the document IDs as the pivotal mechanism to establish the relationship between queries and documents, whereas not every document in the document collection has its corresponding relevant and irrelevant queries for the training purpose. In view of this, we put forward to leveraging supervised contrastive learning to better render the relationship between queries and documents in the latent semantic space. Furthermore, an approximate nearest neighbor search strategy is employed at retrieval time to further assist the Transformer model in generating document IDs relevant to a posed query more efficiently. A series of experiments conducted on the Nature Question benchmark dataset confirm the effectiveness and practical feasibility of our approach in relation to some strong baseline systems.

With the recent breakthrough of deep learning technologies, research on machine reading comprehension (MRC) has attracted much attention and found its versatile applications in many use cases. MRC is an important natural language processing (NLP) task aiming to assess the ability of a machine to understand natural language expressions, which is typically operationalized by first asking questions based on a given text paragraph and then receiving machine-generated answers in accordance with the given context paragraph and questions. In this paper, we leverage two novel pretrained language models built on top of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), namely BERT-wwm and MacBERT, to develop effective MRC methods. In addition, we also seek to investigate whether additional incorporation of the categorical information about a context paragraph can benefit MRC or not, which is achieved based on performing context paragraph clustering on the training dataset. On the other hand, an ensemble learning approach is proposed to harness the synergistic power of the aforementioned two BERT-based models so as to further promote MRC performance.

There has been increasing demand to develop effective computer-assisted language training (CAPT) systems, which can provide feedback on mispronunciations and facilitate second-language (L2) learners to improve their speaking proficiency through repeated practice. Due to the shortage of non-native speech for training the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module of a CAPT system, the corresponding mispronunciation detection performance is often affected by imperfect ASR. Recognizing this importance, we in this paper put forward a two-stage mispronunciation detection method. In the first stage, the speech uttered by an L2 learner is processed by an end-to-end ASR module to produce N-best phone sequence hypotheses. In the second stage, these hypotheses are fed into a pronunciation model which seeks to faithfully predict the phone sequence hypothesis that is most likely pronounced by the learner, so as to improve the performance of mispronunciation detection. Empirical experiments conducted a English benchmark dataset seem to confirm the utility of our method.