Intelligent Tutoring System for Voice Conversion in English

Effective systems for teaching languages like English has always been in demand, and is an active area of research. This paper discusses a system for tutoring the grammatical voice conversion aimed at students in the age group of 12 to 16 years. One major concern in such systems is in generating adequate range of sentences for teaching and evaluation. We use a sentence generation mechanism, based on a template structure, for this purpose. Use of template structure helps in generation of a large number of meaningful and grammatically correct sentences. Another concern is to assess the student response correctly, to identify the error and provide proper feedback. Our system addresses this through a carefully designed set of knowledge bases. Currently the system can handle the conversion for simple sentences in almost all common tenses, this is being extended to handle more complex sentences. A pilot study has been conducted to test the utility of the system, and the results are very positive.