ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

An Equitable Framework for Automatically Assessing Children's Oral Narrative Language Abilities

Alexander Johnson, Hariram Veeramani, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Abeer Alwan

This work proposes a novel framework for automatically scoring children's oral narrative language abilities. We use audio recordings from 3rd-8th graders of the Atlanta, Georgia area as they take a portion of the Test of Narrative Language. We design a system which extracts linguistic features and fine-tuned BERT-based self-supervised learning representation from state-of-the-art ASR transcripts. We predict manual test scores from the extracted features. This framework significantly outperforms a deterministic method based on the assessment's scoring rubric. Last, we evaluate the system performance across student's reading level, dialect, and diagnosed learning/language disabilities to establish fairness across diverse demographics of students. Using this system, we achieve approximately 98% classification accuracy of student scores. We are also able to identify key areas of improvement for this type of system across demographic areas and reading ability.