Pronunciation scaffolder: Annotation accuracy

This paper reports the annotation accuracy of the Pronunciation Scaffolder (ver. 2.0), an online tool to help learners of English read presentation scripts aloud. Scripts are automatically annotated using rulebased pattern matching. Colour, font sizes and symbols are used to provide intuitive visual prompts. Annotation accuracy was evaluated by systematically checking the accuracy of all the annotation functions on a political speech. Each instance of false positive, false negative and true positive results was tagged using predefined hashcodes. The hashcodes were counted. The results show that the Pronunciation Scaffolder performed extremely well for content words and reasonably well for most other functions. However, the word stress function resulted in the many false negative results and the linking function resulted in many false positive results. These results inform the development of version 3.0.