A Pilot Study of Applying Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion to Evaluate the Intelligibility of L2 Speech Using a Native Speaker's Shadowings
<|reference_start|>A Pilot Study of Applying Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion to Evaluate the Intelligibility of L2 Speech Using a Native Speaker's Shadowings: Utterances by L2 speakers can be unintelligible due to mispronunciation and improper prosody. In computer-aided language learning systems, textual feedback is often provided using a speech recognition engine. However, an ideal form of feedback for L2 speakers should be so fine-grained that it enables them to detect and diagnose unintelligible parts of L2 speakers' utterances. Inspired by language teachers who correct students' pronunciation through a voice-to-voice process, this pilot study utilizes a unique semi-parallel dataset composed of non-native speakers' (L2) reading aloud, shadowing of native speakers (L1) and their script-shadowing utterances. We explore the technical possibility of replicating the process of an L1 speaker's shadowing L2 speech using Voice Conversion techniques, to create a virtual shadower system. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the VC system in simulating L1's shadowing behavior. The output of the virtual shadower system shows a reasonable similarity to the real L1 shadowing utterances in both linguistic and acoustic aspects.<|reference_end|>
@article{geng2024a,
    title={A Pilot Study of Applying Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion to
  Evaluate the Intelligibility of L2 Speech Using a Native Speaker's Shadowings},
    author={Haopeng Geng, Daisuke Saito, Nobuaki Minematsu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02239},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2410.02239},
    primaryClass={cs.SD cs.CL eess.AS}
}