Genius, non-native speaking oral evaluation

MONDRAGON LINGUA, ADDITU, VICOMTECH and ISEA are developing industrial research aimed at obtaining a set of tools that allows educational centers to automate their oral assessment processes thanks to the incorporation of speech technologies. The project is being financed through the HAZITEK program of the Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and the Environment of the Basque Government.

During the first year, a preliminary GENIUS design was carried out: i) automatic evaluation process and identification of characteristics to be evaluated, ii) technical specifications and functionalities of the tool, and iii) solution architecture. A database of 500 exercises was obtained for the evaluation of speech.

On the other hand, the second phase has focused on normalizing the compiled corpus, so that it can be used to train the technology of automatic oral evaluation of non-native speech, the objective of the project (analysis of the characteristics related to pronunciation, and prosody and recognition of the content of utterances in non-native speech).

Finally, during this third year, it is expected to carry out the implementation of the automatic scoring model from which GENIUS will be able to generate speech evaluation metrics, based on the characteristics extracted by the speech processing algorithms developed in the previous phase. In addition, it will be verified that the scores generated are directly correlated with the human evaluations carried out by expert teachers from Mondragon Lingua.

Once the development of the technological components has been completed, they will be integrated in the form of a web application through which interested students, companies and / or Administrations can carry out automatic oral evaluations. To evaluate the performance and acceptance of the GENIUS system by users, pilot tests will be carried out with a controlled set of students with different levels.