A previous study showed that pedagogical agents that offer feedback with appropriate politeness strategies can help students learn better [21]. This work studied the Politeness Effect in a foreign language intelligent tutoring system, and provided further evidence that tutorial feedback with socially intelligent strategies can influence motivation and learning outcomes.

The computation of the optimal phonetic alignment and the phonetic similarity between words is an important step in many applications in computational phonology, including dialectometry. After discussing several related algorithms, I present a novel approach to the problem that employs a scoring scheme for computing phonetic similarity between phonetic segments on the basis of multivalued artic...

In this paper, we discuss the results of the IUCL system in the NLI Shared Task 2017. For our system, we explore a variety of phonetic algorithms to generate features for Native Language Identification. These features are contrasted with one of the most successful type of features in NLI, character n-grams. We find that although phonetic features do not perform as well as character n-grams alon...

This paper proposes a classification module for fricative consonants in telephone speech using an acoustic-phonetic feature extrapolation technique. In channel-deteriorated telephone speech, acoustic cues of fricative consonants are expected to be degraded or missing due to limited bandwidth. This paper applies an extrapolation technique to acoustic-phonetic features based on Gaussian mixture m...

Coarticulation is an important phenomenon that affects the realization of phonetic segments in fluent speech. The effects of coarticulation are prominent in both spectral and temporal domains. Various effects of phonetic contexts on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments have been previously reported based on individual distinctive features (e.g., voiced stops lengthen and unvoiced stop...