MAT: a tool for L2 pronunciation errors annotation

Abstract

In the area of Computer Assisted Language Learning(CALL), second language (L2) learners’ spoken data is an important resource for analysing and annotating typical L2 pronunciation errors. The annotation of L2 pronunciation errors in spoken data is not an easy task though, normally it requires manual annotation from trained linguists or phoneticians. In order to facilitate this task, in this paper, we present the MAT tool, a web-based tool intended to facilitate the annotation of L2 learners’ pronunciation errors at various levels. The tool has been designed taking into account recent studies on error detection in pronunciation training. It also aims at providing an easy and fast annotation process via a comprehensive and friendly user interface. The tool is based on the MARY TTS open source platform, from which it uses the components: text analyser (tokeniser, syllabifier, phonemiser), phonetic aligner and speech signal processor. Annotation results at sentence, word, syllable and phoneme levels are stored in XML format. The tool is currently under evaluation with a L2 learners’ spoken corpus recorded in the SPRINTER (Language Technology for Interactive, Multi-Media Online Language Learning) project.

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