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 Lan-guage Learning (CALL) application. We describe a computer game we have devel-oped, in which the system presents sen-tences in a student’s native language to elicit spoken translations in the target new language. A critical technology is an al-gorithm to automatically verify the ap-propriateness of the student’s translation using linguistic analysis. Evaluation re-sults are presented on the system’s abil-ity to match human judgment of the cor-rectness of a student’s translation, for a set of 1115 utterances collected from 9 learn-ers 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.