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Main Authors: Getman, Yaroslav, Grósz, Tamás, Kurimo, Mikko, Salvi, Giampiero
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20678
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author Getman, Yaroslav
Grósz, Tamás
Kurimo, Mikko
Salvi, Giampiero
author_facet Getman, Yaroslav
Grósz, Tamás
Kurimo, Mikko
Salvi, Giampiero
contents This paper presents the "Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment" (NOCASA) - a data competition part of the IEEE MLSP 2025 conference. NOCASA challenges participants to develop new systems that can assess single-word pronunciations of young second language (L2) learners as part of a gamified pronunciation training app. To achieve this, several issues must be addressed, most notably the limited nature of available training data and the highly unbalanced distribution among the pronunciation level categories. To expedite the development, we provide a pseudo-anonymized training data (TeflonNorL2), containing 10,334 recordings from 44 speakers attempting to pronounce 205 distinct Norwegian words, human-rated on a 1 to 5 scale (number of stars that should be given in the game). In addition to the data, two already trained systems are released as official baselines: an SVM classifier trained on the ComParE_16 acoustic feature set and a multi-task wav2vec 2.0 model. The latter achieves the best performance on the challenge test set, with an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 36.37%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20678
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment Challenge (NOCASA)
Getman, Yaroslav
Grósz, Tamás
Kurimo, Mikko
Salvi, Giampiero
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
This paper presents the "Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment" (NOCASA) - a data competition part of the IEEE MLSP 2025 conference. NOCASA challenges participants to develop new systems that can assess single-word pronunciations of young second language (L2) learners as part of a gamified pronunciation training app. To achieve this, several issues must be addressed, most notably the limited nature of available training data and the highly unbalanced distribution among the pronunciation level categories. To expedite the development, we provide a pseudo-anonymized training data (TeflonNorL2), containing 10,334 recordings from 44 speakers attempting to pronounce 205 distinct Norwegian words, human-rated on a 1 to 5 scale (number of stars that should be given in the game). In addition to the data, two already trained systems are released as official baselines: an SVM classifier trained on the ComParE_16 acoustic feature set and a multi-task wav2vec 2.0 model. The latter achieves the best performance on the challenge test set, with an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 36.37%.
title Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment Challenge (NOCASA)
topic Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20678