Speech- And text-driven features for automated scoring of english speaking tasks

Abstract

We consider the automatic scoring of a task for which both the content of the response as well the pronunciation and fluency are important. We combine features from a text-only content scoring system originally designed for written responses with several categories of acoustic features. Although adding any single category of acoustic features to the text-only system on its own does not significantly improve performance, adding all acoustic features together does yield a small but significant improvement. These results are consistent for responses to openended questions and to questions focused on some given source material.