Expert L2 English Speech Evaluation on a Gaming PC: Accuracy, Fluency, and Prosody with XLS-R, XEUS, and PhoneticXeus

arXiv:2610.26406v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: oollim is a locally executable system for evaluating L2 English pronunciation accuracy, fluency, and prosody on a consumer computer. The system combines pretrained XLS-R, XEUS, and PhoneticXeus representations with reference-text features and ridge regressions trained on SpeechOcean762, the Korean Learners' L2 Speech Corpus (English), J-AESOP, and their combinations. On 305 independently held-out recordings assessed by three expert raters, several ridge configurations substantially outperform archival Microsoft Azure Pronunciation Assessment API data in both Spearman correlation and quadratic weighted kappa across all three constructs. These results support expert speech evaluation on consumer hardware using pretrained representations and construct-specific regressions, without neural-model fine-tuning or calibration on the private evaluation data.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-10-27