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SUMMARY:Automatic Assessment Systems for the Spoken CALL Shared Tasks - Me
 ngjie Qian\, Cambridge University Engineering Department
DTSTART:20210511T110000Z
DTEND:20210511T120000Z
UID:TALK158845@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Kate Knill
DESCRIPTION:*Abstract*:\nThe Spoken CALL Shared Task is a series of tasks 
 that assess English responses of German-speaking Swiss teenagers according
  to grammar and meaning correctness. This talk presents the systems develo
 ped by the University of Birmingham (UoB) for the Spoken CALL Shared Tasks
 . UoB systems consist of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system and 
 a Text Processing (TP) system. The target speakers of the ASR are German-s
 peaking children aged between 12 and 15 years\, both factors -- children a
 nd non-native -- make ASR more challenging. This work investigates differe
 nt techniques to compensate for the effects of non-native and children on
  the performance of ASR systems. The study mainly utilises hybrid DNN-HMM 
 systems with conventional DNNs\, LSTMs and TDNN models. For the text proce
 ssing component\, we focused on providing accept/reject feedback to learne
 rs based on the text generated by the ASR system. A rule-based and a machi
 ne learning-based system were proposed for making the judgement\, several 
 aspects of the systems were evaluated. The influence of the ASR system on
  the text processing system was explored.\n\n*Bio*:\nMengjie Qian is a Res
 earch Assistant in the Speech Group of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory
 \, Engineering Department of Cambridge University. Mengjie did her PhD in 
 the Speech Group at the University of Birmingham\, supervised by Prof. Mar
 tin Russell. She submitted her thesis in January 2021. The title of her th
 esis is "Computer Analysis of Children’s Non-Native English Speech for L
 anguage Learning and Assessment". Her research interests include speech re
 cognition\, speaker diarisation and natural language processing.\n
LOCATION:Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95352633552?pwd=RzJVK2UzOGZyNU5mVHd1Y1VPT
 2tDUT09
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