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ConPCO: Preserving Phoneme Characteristics for Automatic Pronunciation Assessment Leveraging Contrastive Ordinal Regularization

5 Jun 2024arXiv:2406.02859archive 2025-07-28

Bi-Cheng Yan, Wei-Cheng Chao, Jiun-Ting Li, Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin-Wei Wang, Meng-Shin Lin, Berlin Chen

Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) manages to evaluate the pronunciation proficiency of a second language (L2) learner in a target language. Existing efforts typically draw on regression models for proficiency score prediction, where the models are trained to estimate target values without explicitly accounting for phoneme-awareness in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a contrastive phonemic ordinal regularizer (ConPCO) tailored for regression-based APA models to generate more phoneme-discriminative features while considering the ordinal relationships among the regression targets. The proposed ConPCO first aligns the phoneme representations of an APA model and textual embeddings of phonetic transcriptions via contrastive learning. Afterward, the phoneme characteristics are retained by regulating the distances between inter- and intra-phoneme categories in the feature space while allowing for the ordinal relationships among the output targets. We further design and develop a hierarchical APA model to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments conducted on the speechocean762 benchmark dataset suggest the feasibility and efficacy of our approach in relation to some cutting-edge baselines.

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Tasks

Contrastive LearningPhone-level pronunciation scoringUtterance-level pronounciation scoringWord-level pronunciation scoringregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Phone-level pronunciation scoring speechocean762 HierCB+ConPCO Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) 0.701 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Utterance-level pronounciation scoring speechocean762 HierCB+ConPCO Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) 0.803 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Word-level pronunciation scoring speechocean762 HierCB+ConPCO Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) 0.682 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

APA

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