Automatic English Pronunciation Evaluation Algorithm Based on Sequence Matching and Feature Fusion

Abstract

This article focuses on the question answering type of automatic scoring system for large-scale spoken English examinations and scores using a method called multifeature fusion. Three types of features are extracted to score using speech recognition text as the research object. The three types of features are similarity, syntactic, and phonetic. There are nine distinct characteristics that describe the relationship between examinee responses and expert ratings. Manhattan distance is improved as a measure of similarity in the similarity feature. Simultaneously, a feature of keyword coverage based on editing distance is proposed, and the phenomenon of word variation in text recognition is fully considered, in order to provide examinees with an objective and fair score. To obtain the machine score, all extracted features were fused using a multiple linear regression model. The experimental results demonstrate that the extracted features are extremely effective for machine scoring, with the system scoring performance of the examinee as a unit equaling 98.4 percent of expert scoring performance.