Building the foundations for automatic assessment of verbal and nonverbal aspects of spoken interaction in Finnish as a second language

In the paper we describe the theoretical and methodological basis of a multidisciplinary project, Aasis, focusing on automatic assessment of spoken interaction in L2 Finnish. The aim is to describe the project corpora that have been built for developing ASA (Automatic Speaking Assessment), not to study detailed empirical research questions as such even though we present some preliminary results from the data. The goals of the project are novel in three ways. Firstly, we aim to develop an ASA (Automatic Speaking Assessment) system to assess oral proficiency in dialogic rather than monologic speech. Secondly, our approach includes automatic assessment of nonverbal features in interaction, extending beyond the more conventionally used ASA tools. Thirdly, the language to be assessed is Finnish, a language with scarce previous studies on ASA.