An online system for entering and annotating non-native Mandarin Chinese speech for language teaching

This thesis describes the design and implementation of an intuitive online system for the annotation of non-native Mandarin Chinese speech by native Chinese speakers. This system will allow speech recognition researchers to easily generate a corpus of labeled non-native speech. We have five native Chinese speakers test the annotation system on a sample bank of 250 Chinese utterances and observe fair to moderate inter-rater agreement scores. In addition to giving us a benchmark for inter-rater agreement, this also demonstrates the feasibility of having remote graders annotate sets of utterances. Finally, we extend our work to Chinese language instruction by creating a web-based interface for Chinese reading assignments. Our design is a simple, integrated solution for completing and correcting of spoken reading assignments, that also streamlines the compilation of a corpus of labeled non-native speech for use in future research.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Hawksley, Andrea Johanna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephanie Seneff.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46128

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46128