Patent ID: 7219059

Claim:
A method for generating a pronunciation score, comprising: receiving a user phrase intended to conform to a reference phrase; and processing said user phrase in accordance with an articulation-scoring engine, a duration scoring engine and an intonation-scoring engine to derive thereby said pronunciation score, wherein the articulation-scoring engine is adapted for: computing a plurality of segment differences between log-likelihood scores for each of a plurality of phoneme segments in said user phase and each of a plurality of corresponding phoneme segments in said reference phrase; and obtaining an articulation score for each phoneme, the articulation scores adapted for determining the pronunciation score, the articulation scores obtained according to the segment differences using an acoustic scoring table constracted by a method comprising: constructing a plurality of phrase conforming phonemes and randomly selected phonemes using voice fragments from a training database; computing a log-likelihood difference for each phoneme of the phrase conforming phonemes; computing a log-likelihood difference for each phoneme of the randomly selected phonemes; calculating a probability density function for the phrase conforming phonemes using the log-likelihood differences computed for the phrase conforming phonemes; calculating a probability density function for the randomly selected phonemes using the log-likelihood differences computed for the randomly selected phonemes; and constructing the acoustic scoring table by associating the probability density functions with a scoring range.