An Initial Investigation of Non-Native Spoken Question-Answering

07/09/2021
by   Vatsal Raina, et al.
0

Text-based machine comprehension (MC) systems have a wide-range of applications, and standard corpora exist for developing and evaluating approaches. There has been far less research on spoken question answering (SQA) systems. The SQA task considered in this paper is to extract the answer from a candidate's spoken response to a question in a prompt-response style language assessment test. Applying these MC approaches to this SQA task rather than, for example, off-topic response detection provides far more detailed information that can be used for further downstream processing. One significant challenge is the lack of appropriately annotated speech corpora to train systems for this task. Hence, a transfer-learning style approach is adopted where a system trained on text-based MC is evaluated on an SQA task with non-native speakers. Mismatches must be considered between text documents and spoken responses; non-native spoken grammar and written grammar. In practical SQA, ASR systems are used, necessitating an investigation of the impact of ASR errors. We show that a simple text-based ELECTRA MC model trained on SQuAD2.0 transfers well for SQA. It is found that there is an approximately linear relationship between ASR errors and the SQA assessment scores but grammar mismatches have minimal impact.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
08/07/2018

ODSQA: Open-domain Spoken Question Answering Dataset

Reading comprehension by machine has been widely studied, but machine co...
research
10/21/2020

Contextualized Attention-based Knowledge Transfer for Spoken Conversational Question Answering

Spoken conversational question answering (SCQA) requires machines to mod...
research
09/30/2019

Non-native Speaker Verification for Spoken Language Assessment

Automatic spoken language assessment systems are becoming more popular i...
research
04/16/2019

Mitigating the Impact of Speech Recognition Errors on Spoken Question Answering by Adversarial Domain Adaptation

Spoken question answering (SQA) is challenging due to complex reasoning ...
research
10/21/2020

Knowledge Distillation for Improved Accuracy in Spoken Question Answering

Spoken question answering (SQA) is a challenging task that requires the ...
research
08/23/2016

Towards Machine Comprehension of Spoken Content: Initial TOEFL Listening Comprehension Test by Machine

Multimedia or spoken content presents more attractive information than p...
research
08/28/2016

Hierarchical Attention Model for Improved Machine Comprehension of Spoken Content

Multimedia or spoken content presents more attractive information than p...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset