The complementary roles of non-verbal cues for Robust Pronunciation
  Assessment
Yassine El Kheir Shammur Absar Chowdhury Ahmed Ali
Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic
and phonological aspects of non-native (L2) speech, often neglecting the rich
layer of information hidden within the non-verbal cues. In this study, we
proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, IntraVerbalPA. % The
framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract
utterance-level non-verbal cues, alongside the conventional speech and phoneme
representations. Additionally, we introduce ''Goodness of phonemic-duration''
metric to effectively model duration distribution within the framework. Our
results validate the effectiveness of the proposed IntraVerbalPA framework and
its individual components, yielding performance that either matches or
outperforms existing research works.