DONG Bin  ZHAO Qingwei  YAN Yonghong

(Zhongke Xinli Speech Laboratory, Institute of Acoustics, The Chinese Academy of Sciences  Beijing  100080)

Received Apr. 12, 2006

Revised Sept. 15, 2006

Abstract  A method used for objective evaluation of pronunciation of finals in standard Chinese is presented. The formant pattern of final is selected as the mam feature and an improved evaluation algorithm based on Support Vector Machine is proposed. In this algorithm, two-level classification strategy is employed. A full-classification model and a sub-classification model are trained for each final. The pronunciation quality is evaluated based on the classification results of this two-level strategy with scoring model of each final. The new evaluation method is compared with traditional methods such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) posterior probability scoring method and feature of Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC), and the results show that the performance is effectively improved by the proposed method. The correlation of scores between human testers and machine has achieved 82%.

PACS number: 43.70