2025/07/23 by Phan, Nhan, Porwal, Anusha, Getman, Yaroslav +3
#Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.17918
We present an efficient end-to-end approach for holistic Automatic Speaking Assessment (ASA) of multi-part second-language tests, developed for the 2025 Speak & Improve Challenge. Our system's main novelty is the ability to process all four spoken responses with a single Whisper-small encoder, combine all information via a lightweight aggregator, and predict the final score. This architecture removes the need for transcription and per-part models, cuts inference time, and makes ASA practical for large-scale Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems. Our system achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.384, outperforming the text-based baseline (0.44) while using at most 168M parameters (about 70% of Whisper-small). Furthermore, we propose a data sampling strategy, allowing the model to train on only 44.8% of the speakers in the corpus and still reach 0.383 RMSE, demonstrating improved performance on imbalanced classes and strong data efficiency.