Towards Efficient and Multifaceted Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training Leveraging Hierarchical Selective State Space Model and Decoupled Cross-entropy Loss

TL;DR

This paper presents HMamba, a unified CAPT system that combines automatic pronunciation assessment and mispronunciation detection using a hierarchical model and a novel loss function, achieving improved accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

The work introduces HMamba, a novel integrated approach for CAPT that combines APA and MDD tasks with a decoupled loss function for better performance.

Findings

Effective on speechocean762 benchmark dataset.

Improves MDD F1-score to 63.85%.

Demonstrates efficiency and multifaceted capabilities.

Abstract

Prior efforts in building computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems often treat automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) and mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) as separate fronts: the former aims to provide multiple pronunciation aspect scores across diverse linguistic levels, while the latter focuses instead on pinpointing the precise phonetic pronunciation errors made by non-native language learners. However, it is generally expected that a full-fledged CAPT system should perform both functionalities simultaneously and efficiently. In response to this surging demand, we in this work first propose HMamba, a novel CAPT approach that seamlessly integrates APA and MDD tasks in parallel. In addition, we introduce a novel loss function, decoupled cross-entropy loss (deXent), specifically tailored for MDD to facilitate better-supervised learning for detecting mispronounced phones, thereby enhancing overall performance. A comprehensive set of empirical results on the speechocean762 benchmark dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach on APA. Notably, our proposed approach also yields a considerable improvement in MDD performance over a strong baseline, achieving an F1-score of 63.85%. Our codes are made available at https://github.com/Fuann/hmamba