Michael Gringo Angelo Bayona

Title: Mobile apps for advanced language learning (speaking/listening)

Supervision Team: Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha, TCD / Andrew Hines, UCD

Student Name: Michael Gringo Angelo Bayona

Description: Speaking and listening in a new language are critical when moving country, especially for those moving for a job or to study in a university where programmes are not delivered in their native language. Opportunities to practice language skills with relevant content, accents and dialects for proficiency in an academic subject with specialised/technical vocabulary are usually limited prior to arriving in the destination country. What if there was a convenient, personalised mobile application that was tailored to an individual to provide targeted learning support based on their language and vocabulary preferences? This project will develop methods to generate user-specific listening materials and computer based systems that can measure and provide feedback on mispronunciation. This project will give the student an opportunity to learn about linguistics, speech signal processing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and state of the art machine learning. Recordings, as well as NLP and text-to-speech synthesis with state of the art voice conversion (VC) will be used to generate content that is relevant to the language learners’ area of study in order to generate listening/reading exercises. Deep Neural Networks using transfer learning will be applied to mispronunciation detection. Computer aided pronunciation teaching (CAPT) will extend AI techniques in the domains of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech quality assessment to evaluate the learner’s speech and provide personalised feedback.