This paper presents our investigation into improving the performance of our previous automatic reading quality assessment system. The method of the baseline system is calculating the average value of the Phone Log-Posterior Probability (PLPP) of all phones in the voice to be assessed, and the average value is used as the reading quality assessment feature. In this paper, we presents three improvements. First, we cluster the triphones, and then calculate the average value of the normalized PLPP for each classification separately, and use this average values as the multi-dimensional assessment features instead of the original one-dimensional assessment feature. This method is simple but effective, which made the score difference of the machine scoring and manual scoring decrease by 30.2% relatively. Second, in order to assess the reading rhythm, we train Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), which contain the information of each triphone's relative duration under standard pronunciation. Using the GMM, we can calculate the probability that the relative duration of each phone is conform to the standard pronunciation, and the average value of the probabilities is added to the assessment feature vector as a dimension of feature, which decreased the score difference between the machine scoring and manual scoring by 9.7% relatively. Third, we detect Filled Pauses (FP) by analyzing the formant curve, and then calculate the relative duration of FP, and add the relative duration of FP to the assessment feature vector as a dimension of feature. This method made the score difference between the machine scoring and manual scoring be further decreased by 10.2% relatively. Finally, when the feature vector extracted by the three methods are used together, the score difference between the machine scoring and manual scoring was decreased by 43.9% relatively compared to the baseline system.

In this paper, we presented a novel method for automatic pronunciation quality assessment. Unlike the popular “Goodness of Pronunciation” (GOP) method, this method does not map the decoding confidence into pronunciation quality score, but differentiates the different pronunciation quality utterances directly. In this method, the student's utterance need to be decoded for two times. The first-time decoding was for getting the time points of each phone of the utterance by a forced alignment using a conventional trained acoustic model (AM). The second-time decoding was for differentiating the pronunciation quality for each triphone using a specially trained AM, where the triphones in different pronunciation qualities were trained as different units, and the model was trained in discriminative method to ensure the model has the best discrimination among the triphones whose names were same but pronunciation quality scores were different. The decoding network in the second-time decoding included different pronunciation quality triphones, so the phone-level scores can be obtained from the decoding result directly. The phone-level scores were combined into the sentence-level scores using maximum entropy criterion. The experimental results shows that the scoring performance was increased significantly compared to the GOP method, especially in sentence-level.