| Presentation # | 1 |
| Session: | Corpora and Evaluation Methodologies |
| Session Time: | Wednesday, December 19, 13:30 - 15:30 |
| Presentation Time: | Wednesday, December 19, 13:30 - 15:30 |
| Presentation: |
Poster
|
| Topic: |
Spoken language corpora: |
| Paper Title: |
DISCOURSE MODELING OF NON-NATIVE SPONTANEOUS SPEECH USING THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE THEORY FRAMEWORK |
| Authors: |
Xinhao Wang; Educational Testing Service | | |
| | Binod Gyawali; Educational Testing Service | | |
| | James V. Bruno; Educational Testing Service | | |
| | Hillary R. Molloy; Educational Testing Service | | |
| | Keelan Evanini; Educational Testing Service | | |
| | Klaus Zechner; Educational Testing Service | | |
| Abstract: |
This study aims to model the discourse structure of spontaneous spoken responses within the context of an assessment of English speaking proficiency for non-native speakers. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been commonly used in the analysis of discourse organization of written texts; however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and parsing of spoken language, in particular, non-native spontaneous speech. Due to the fact that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key metric in human scoring rubrics for assessments of spoken language, we initiated a research effort to first obtain RST annotations on non-native spoken responses from a standardized assessment of academic English proficiency. Afterwards, based on the annotations obtained, automatic parsers were built to process non-native spontaneous speech. Finally, a set of effective features were extracted from both manually annotated and automatically generated RST trees to evaluate the discourse structure of non-native spontaneous speech, and then employed to further improve the validity of an automated speech scoring system. |