Impact of ASR Performance on Spoken Grammatical Error Detection

Computer assisted language learning (CALL) systems aid learners to monitor their progress by providing scoring and feedback on language assessment tasks. Free speaking tests allow assessment of what a learner has said, as well as how they said it. For these tasks, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is required to generate transcriptions of a candidate’s responses, the quality of these transcriptions is crucial to provide reliable feedback in downstream processes. This paper considers the impact of ASR performance on Grammatical Error Detection (GED) for free speaking tasks, as an example of providing feedback on a learner’s use of English. The performance of an advanced deep-learning based GED system, initially trained on written corpora, is used to evaluate the influence of ASR errors. One consequence of these errors is that grammatical errors can result from incorrect transcriptions as well as learner errors, this may yield confusing feedback. To mitigate the effect of these errors, and reduce erroneous feedback, ASR confidence scores are incorporated into the GED system. By additionally adapting the written text GED system to the speech domain, using ASR transcriptions, significant gains in performance can be achieved. Analysis of the GED performance for different grammatical error types and across grade is also presented.