Conference article

A web-deployed Swedish spoken CALL system based on a large shared English/Swedish feature grammar

Manny Rayner
University of Geneva, FTI/TIM, Switzerland

Johanna Gerlach
University of Geneva, FTI/TIM, Switzerland

Marianne Starlander
University of Geneva, FTI/TIM, Switzerland

Nikos Tsourakis
University of Geneva, FTI/TIM, Switzerland

Anita Kruckenberg
Royal College of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Robert Eklund
Linköping University, Sweden

Arne Jönsson
Linköping University, Sweden

Anita McAllister
Linköping University, Sweden

Cathy Chua
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

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Published in: Proceedings of the SLTC 2012 workshop on NLP for CALL; Lund; 25th October; 2012

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 80:5, p. 35-44

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Published: 2012-11-12

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ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

We describe a Swedish version of CALL-SLT; a web-deployed CALL system that allows beginner/ intermediate students to practise generative spoken language skills. Speech recognition is grammar-based; with language models derived; using the Regulus platform; from substantial domain-independent feature grammars. The paper focusses on the Swedish grammar resources; which were developed by generalising the existing English feature grammar into a shared grammar for English and Swedish. It turns out that this can be done very economically: all but a handful of rules and features are shared; and English grammar essentially ends up being treated as a reduced form of Swedish. We conclude by presenting a simple evaluation which compares the Swedish and French versions of CALL-SLT.

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