Title
Multi-Task Learning For Mispronunciation Detection On Singapore Children'S Mandarin Speech
Abstract
Speech technology for children is more challenging than for adults, because there is a lack of children's speech corpora. Moreover, there is higher heterogeneity in children's speech due to variability in anatomy across age and gender, larger variance in speaking rate and vocal effort, and immature command of word usage, grammar, and linguistic structure. Speech productions from Singapore children possess even more variability due to the multilingual environment in the city-state, causing inter influences from Chinese languages (e.g., Hokkien and Mandarin), English dialects (e.g., American and British), and Indian languages (e.g., Hindi and Tamil). In this paper, we show that acoustic modeling of children's speech can leverage on a larger set of adult data, We compare two data augmentation approaches for children's acoustic modeling. The first approach disregards the child and adult categories and consolidates the two datasets together as one entire set. The second approach is multi-task learning: during training the acoustic characteristics of adults and children are jointly learned through shared hidden layers of the deep neural network, yet they still retain their respective targets using two distinct softmax layers. We empirically show that the multi-task learning approach outperforms the baseline in both speech recognition and computer-assisted pronunciation training.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.21437/Interspeech.2017-520
18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (INTERSPEECH 2017), VOLS 1-6: SITUATED INTERACTION
Keywords
Field
DocType
automatic speech recognition (ASR), multi-task learning (MTL), human-computer interaction (HCI), computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT), computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
Multi-task learning,Computer science,Speech recognition,Mandarin Chinese
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2308-457X
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rong Tong110811.33
Nancy F. Chen212028.98
Bin Ma360047.26