SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC ASSESSMENT OF FLUENCY IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND A METHOD THEREOF

A person’s speech in any language conveys meaning through its lexical content (what is said) and its prosody (how it is said). Both aspects are critical to the communication effectiveness of spoken language. Prosody involves the manipulation of supra-segmental attributes such as stress, pauses, intonation, loudness and relative durations of the words. Akin to punctuation in written text, prosody enhances the structural aspects of spoken language, makes prominent the significant words and serves to bring out affect, all of which function to contribute to the comprehensibility of the message or text. While there are several patents technologies on speech assessment in general in terms of word pronunciation correctness, there are fewer that assess lexical and prosodic fluencies. Lexical fluency is evaluated based on detected hesitations, repetitions and filled/unfilled pauses. Prosodic fluency is typically assessed in terms of intonation pattern matching with a reference pattern such as that from a tutor’s utterance of the same text.

Features of our invention:

• A solution that can rate spoken language fluency in each of the two possible cases: (i) Text-dependent: where the speaker reads out presented text. (ii) Text-independent: where the speaker utters a monologue using words of his/ her choice.
• A solution for acoustic analyses of recorded speech carried out to rate a speaker’s oral skills.
• A system for performing speaking fluency assessment comprising a trained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) unit for obtaining a transcription of speech, wherein the speech is recorded using an input unit.
• The said system comprises a user attributes extraction block configured to accept a user audio as input and to extract a set of user attributes, a model attributes extraction block configured to receive model text and the corresponding information structure and to extract the corresponding set of model attributes, and an attributes comparison block configured to perform comparison of the set of user attributes and the set of model attributes to obtain a fluency report.
• Apart from pronunciation, fluency, phrasing, and prominence, our invention claims the additional attributes of confidence, cadence & comprehensibility.