Spoken Language Processing for Language Learning and Assessment

Abstract: This tutorial will provide an in-depth survey of the state of the art in spoken language processing in language learning and assessment from a practitioner’s perspective. The first part of the tutorial will discuss in detail the acoustic, speech, and language processing challenges in recognizing and dealing with native and non-native speech from both adults and children from different language backgrounds at scale. The second part of the tutorial will examine the current state of the art in both knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches to automated scoring of such data along various dimensions of spoken language proficiency, be it monologic or dialogic in nature. The final part of the tutorial will look at a hot topic and key challenge facing the field at the moment – that of automatically generating targeted feedback for language learners that can help them improve their overall spoken language proficiency. The presenters, based at Educational Testing Service R&D in Princeton and San Francisco, USA, have more than 40 years of combined R&D experience in spoken language processing for education, speech recognition, spoken dialog systems and automated speech scoring.