ISCA Archive SLaTE 2023
ISCA Archive SLaTE 2023

Can the decoded text from automatic speech recognition effectively detect spoken grammar errors?

Chowdam Venkata Thirumala Kumar, Meenakshi Sirigiraju, Rakesh Vaideeswaran, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Chiranjeevi Yarra

Language learning involves the correct acquisition of grammar skills. To facilitate learning with computer-assisted systems, automatic spoken grammatical error detection (SGED) is necessary. This work explores Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which decodes text from speech, for SGED. With current advancements in ASR technology, often it can be believed that these systems could capture spoken grammatical errors in the decoded text. However, these systems have an inherent bias from the language model towards the grammatically correct text. We explore the ASR-decoded text from commercially available current state-of-the-art systems considering a text-based GED algorithm and also its word-level confidence score (CS) for SGED. We perform the experiments on the spoken English data collected in-house from 13 subjects speaking 4110 grammatically erroneous and correct sentences. We found the highest relative improvement in SGED with CS is 15.36% compared to that with decoded text plus GED.