AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF THE PRONUNCIATION WITH CALL-SLT, A CONVERSATION PARTNER EXCLUSIVELY BASED ON SPEECH RECOGNITION

At a time when markets are globalizing, second language acquisition is increasingly important in current society. More than a way to stand out, multilingualism has become a necessity, especially in multilingual countries such as Switzerland. Like many aspects of the day to day life, language learning is being revolutionized by technological progress. Today, CALL (Computer-assisted language learning) software allows users to acquire a new language at their own pace, without any constraints of time and place. Thanks to the great evolution of speech recognition technology, it is now possible to interact orally with computers. On this basis, the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of Geneva University developed its own software called CALL-SLT, a conversation partner exclusively based on speech recognition. Since its usefulness as a learning coach has already been proven, we propose a new experiment aiming to discover if CALL-SLT can also play the role of an automatic evaluator of the L2 pronunciation. 17 French speakers were given access to the tool and took a test specially developed for this purpose. In this paper, we will present the method we used and summarize the results. While these are not perfect, they are very encouraging and suggest that an evaluation of pronunciation with speech recognition is indeed possible.