Applause: A Learning Tool for Low-Resource Languages

In this paper, we describe the concept of an interactive tool which can be employed to build a dialog system to facilitate pronunciation training in situations where only a few minutes of speech in the target language are available. We leverage recent advances in low-resource speech processing, and envision a tool which will help organizations working in the developing world to quickly create initial training lessons for new languages. Development will be possible using mobile devices alone, and without the requirement of significant technical skills or language-specific information. If users are ultimately able to acquire at least rudimentary proficiency in a low-resource language or dialect using our automatic system, they should find it much easier to communicate, establish trust, and build rapport with the local population than without such support. In this paper, we present the operational principles of our approach, describe a proof-of-concept implementation that we are currently developing, and summarize ideas for evaluation at the technical, language-learning, and user interface levels.