Automatic Assessment of Student Translations for Foreign Language Tutoring

This paper introduces the use of speech translation technology for a new type of voice-interactive Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) application. We describe a computer game we have developed, in which the system presents sentences in a student’s native language to elicit spoken translations in the target new language. A critical technology is an algorithm to automatically verify the appropriateness of the student’s translation using linguistic analysis. Evaluation results are presented on the system’s ability to match human judgment of the correctness of a student’s translation, for a set of 1115 utterances collected from 9 learners of Mandarin Chinese translating flight domain sentences. We also demonstrate the effective use of context information to improve both recognition performance on non-native speech as well as the system’s accuracy in judging the translation quality.