Automatic Assessment of Reading with Speech RecognitionTechnology

Abstract

In this paper, we describe ongoing research towards building an automatic reading assessment system that emulates a human expert in a spoken language learning scenario. Audio recordings of read aloud English stories by children of grades 6-8 are acquired on an available tablet application that facilitates guided oral reading and recording. The created recordings, uploaded to a web-based ratings panel, are currently evaluated by human experts on four relevant dimensions. Observations of typical learner progress patterns will form the bases of a system that applies Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques to obtain robust automatic predictions of reading fluency and word decoding accuracy.