Abstract
We present and evaluate a machine learning based system that automatically grades audios of students speaking a foreign language. The use of automated systems to aid the assessment of student performance holds great promise in augmenting the teacher’s ability to provide meaningful feedback and instruction to students. Teachers spend a significant amount of time grading student work and the use of these tools can save teachers a significant amount of time on their grading. This additional time could be used to give personalized attention to each student. Significant prior research has focused on the grading of closed-form problems, open-ended essays and textual content. However, little research has focused on audio content that is much more prevalent in the language-study education. In this paper, we explore the development of automated assessment tools for audio responses in a college-level Chinese language-learning course. We analyze several challenges faced while working with data of this type as well as the generation and extraction of features for the purpose of building machine learning models to aid in the assessment of student language learning.