Development of an online subjective evaluation system for recorded speech of deaf and hard of hearing children

The aim of this paper is to present a web-based evaluation system developed as part of a research has been carried out in cooperation with University of Debrecen and University of Miskolc in the framework of the project TÁMOP-4.2.2.C-11/1/KONV (Social Renewal Operational Programme) called `Basic and Applied Research for Internet-based Speech Development of Deaf and Hard of Hearing People and for Objective Measurement of Their Progress´. The project is aimed at solving basic and applied research tasks to develop an application to support the speech teaching and understanding of deaf and hearing-impaired people more effectively than known methods. The idea of the project has come from an audio-visual transcoder for sound visualization developed at the University of Debrecen, and a three-dimensional head model for articulation presentation, called `talking head´ developed at the University of Miskolc. The most important aim of the project is to create a complex system to provide audio-visual speech recognition by visualization of images of speech and articulation, setting up an educational framework. In addition, the system has many other features (prosody display, automatic evaluation and knowledge-based systems implementation), which subsequently allow individual practice not only on computers but also on mobile devices. However, it is important to note that personal contribution of surdo-pedagogues can not be replaced, but can greatly support. The module performing the required audio-visual transcoding is language-independent, the talking head, moreover automatic qualification can be made language-independent by training new neural networks. For development of automatic qualification, the recorded speech samples has been required to be evaluated by surdo-pedagogues and lay students. The online evaluation system developed for this purpose is shown in this paper.