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arXiv · 2606.19910

Light-weight Pronunciation Assessment via Discrete Speech Token Surprisal

Syeda Faiza Ahmed Sara·Shammur Absar Chowdhury
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Abstract

Training automated pronunciation assessment often relies on labeled learner errors or non-native corpora that are costly to collect. We propose a lightweight framework trained only on native speech resources, operating unsupervised or lightly calibrated with a small set of scored utterances. At inference, learner speech is discretized with an SSL encoder and a K-means codebook. A token language model trained on native sequences computes surprisal where higher surprisal indicates phonotactic deviation. We add a transcript-guided Text2DUnit--DTW module that predicts native token sequences from reference text and aligns them to acoustic tokens to derive error-sensitive features. Surprisal and alignment features are fused via simple regression. On SpeechOcean762, PCC improves from 0.60 to 0.66 with transcript guidance, near supervised baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation on L2-ARCTIC shows consistent gains.

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Syeda Faiza Ahmed Sara, Shammur Absar Chowdhury. 2026-06-18. Light-weight Pronunciation Assessment via Discrete Speech Token Surprisal. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19910

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