ABSTRACT

Fluency in terms of speed of speech and (lack of) hesitations such as silent and filled pauses (‘uhm’s) is part of oral proficiency. Language assessment rubrics therefore include aspects of fluency. Measuring fluency, however, is highly time-consuming because of the manual labour involved. The current paper aims to automatically measure aspects of L2 fluency, including filled pauses, in both Dutch and English. A revised existing script and a new script for filled pauses are tested on accuracy. We also gauged whether the outcomes of the new script could be used for language assessment purposes by relating the outcomes to human judgements. Without further investigations, the current script should not (yet) be used for the purpose of assessing fluency automatically in (high-stakes) oral proficiency assessment. However, the performance of the scripts for measuring aspects of fluency globally and quickly are promising, especially given their stability in accuracy on new corpora.

摘要

流畅的语速和（没有）犹豫，如无声和充满停顿（“嗯”）是口语能力的一部分。因此，语言评估标准包括流利程度。然而，由于涉及体力劳动，测量流畅度非常耗时。目前的论文旨在自动测量荷兰语和英语的 L2 流利度，包括填充停顿。对已修订的现有脚本和用于填充暂停的新脚本的准确性进行了测试。我们还通过将结果与人类判断联系起来来衡量新脚本的结果是否可以用于语言评估目的。在没有进一步调查的情况下，当前的脚本不应该（还）用于在（高风险）口语能力评估中自动评估流利程度。然而，