An automatic tool for language evaluation

The aim of evaluating children speech and language is to measure their communication skills. In particular, the speech language pathologist is interested in determining the child's impairments in the areas of language, articulation, voice, fluency and swallowing. In literature some standardized tests have been proposed to assess and screen developmental language impairments but they require manual laborious transcription, annotation and calculation. This work is very time demanding and, also, may introduce several kinds of errors in the evaluation phase and non-uniform evaluations. In order to help therapists, a system performing automated evaluation is proposed. Providing as input the correct sentence and the sentence produced by patients, the technique evaluates the level of the verbal production and returns a score. The main phases of the method concern an ad-hoc transformation of the produced sentence in the reference sentence and in the evaluation of the cost of this transformation. Since the cost function is related to many weights, a learning phase is defined to automatically set such weights.