词汇大师-- Using Language Technology

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: an electronic tutoring system that helps non-native speakers of American English learn to pronounce words with a native accent.

　　RS: The product is called NativeAccent. It's sold by the Carnegie Speech company, with software technology under license¹ from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The system is being used, for example, to train customer service representatives at call centers in India, so they are more understandable to native English speakers in other countries.
AA: We talked to Gary Pelton, director of product development for Carnegie Speech, and Jaime Carbonell, director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon. They say the aim is accent to reduce an accent, not eliminate it. We asked Jaime Carbonnell which languages are most difficult for NativeAccent to handle.
JAIME CARBONELL: "The product has models for different source language, different original languages of the speakers. It has models for Chinese, Spanish, French, Arabic, German -- twenty-six different languages. Some of the languages are harder because they are further away from English. Chinese is one of the harder ones, for example."
AA: "So the success rate for NativeAccent, for the software, when it's actually correcting the students, might be lower than if it were, say, Spanish or French?"
JAIME CARBONELL: "It's usually measured as time on task. If you're in a language that diverges² more from English, you have to use the product longer before you can get to the same level of performance."
RS: "I just want to get a clear understanding of how this works. Either you or Gary can tell  us how a student would approach this machine."
JAMIE CARBONELL: Well, Gary is the expert on that so I'll turn it over to him.
GARY PELTON: "Probably the easiest thing to do is for me to play an example. What I have here is I have a Mandarin³ speaker that is reading a sentence and the sentence is, 'It's just like the picture in my geography book.'"
CHINESE SPEAKER: "It's just like the picture in my geography book."
GARY PELTON: "So what comes up on the screen is you see the actual words, but some of them are marked in red. What we've done is we compared his speech for that little part in the end of the 'geography,' the little y sound, to how a group of native speakers said geography. And, we noticed that he was far away from that group of native English speakers. He also was far away for the 'eo' sound in geography."
AA: "And, how was the correction suggested?"
GARY PELTON: "So below that, what it does is it looks at the part that is farthest away and then gives him some text to tell him how to make the 'e' sound in geography better and also gives him pictures and so forth⁴ of what he has to do in his mouth."
AA: "So does the student hear a correct version too, in addition to the text and the pictures of what to do with his mouth, does he actually get to hear it and replay the correct way to say it?"
GARY PELTON: "Yes. So he actually gets a choice of several different model speakers. Since it is a male, he gets male model speakers. We've done studies that show that that makes a big difference if you're trying to mimic⁵ somebody in the same vocal⁶ range and speed that what you're working with."
RS: "So is what you are doing with all this text and the correction, is that meant to direct the students so that they become aware that this sound exists?"
JAMIE CARBONELL: "Yes, the original inventor of this idea, her name is Maxine Eskenazi -- she is the one who designed the techniques. And one of the techniques is to grossly⁷ exaggerate the difference between the sound that the student is using and the sound that they really should be saying, so that they can hear that there is indeed a difference. And then after they perceive that difference, then you minimize⁸ the exaggeration until it comes gradually back to normal."
RS: Jaime Carbonell, director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. We also spoke⁹ with Gary Pelton, director of product development for Carnegie Speech.
AA: The product NativeAccent was displayed this week at Interspeech 2006: the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, at Carnegie Mellon. The conference attracted 1,000 scientists from around the world to explore ways in which people and computers use and understand each other.
RS: And, that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected]. And it's it American English you want to hear, check out our Web site at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

1 license   

n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许

参考例句：

• The foreign guest has a license on the person.这个外国客人随身携带执照。
• The driver was arrested for having false license plates on his car.司机由于使用假车牌而被捕。

2 diverges   

分开( diverge的第三人称单数 )； 偏离； 分歧； 分道扬镳

参考例句：

• The beam of flashlight diverges, but it can be refocused with lenses. 一个发散的闪光灯束可以用透镜重新聚焦。
• At the end of the wood, the path diverges to the left. 在树林的尽头，小路向左拐去。

3 Mandarin   

n.中国官话，国语，满清官吏；adj.华丽辞藻的

参考例句：

• Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
• Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。

4 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

5 mimic   

v.模仿，戏弄；n.模仿他人言行的人

参考例句：

• A parrot can mimic a person's voice.鹦鹉能学人的声音。
• He used to mimic speech peculiarities of another.他过去总是模仿别人讲话的特点。

6 vocal   

adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目

参考例句：

• The tongue is a vocal organ.舌头是一个发音器官。
• Public opinion at last became vocal.终于舆论哗然。

7 grossly   

adv. 非常, 很, 粗

参考例句：

• He presents the theory in a grossly simplified form. 他极其简明地陈述了这个理论。
• The punishment was grossly disproportionate to the crime. 这种惩罚与罪行极不相称。

8 minimize   

vt.使减（缩）小到最低，极力贬低，最低估计

参考例句：

• To minimize the risk of burglary,install a good alarm system.安装可靠的报警设备以减低被盗的风险。
• To minimize the public expenditure of this country.把该国的财政支出减少到最低限度。

9 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。