Introducing vocabulary assessment API

According to famous American researcher and educator, Johnson O’Connor, a person’s vocabulary strength is a direct predictor of their occupational success. O’Connor quotes, “I once tested the president of a coal-mining company in Pennsylvania. He was a man who had worked his way up from the pits and his grammar was terrible. Yet, in all the vocabulary tests, he got only 2 words wrong.”. Additional research from Harvard University suggests that people with advanced vocabularies tend to have better comprehension skills, are deeper thinkers and are adept at expressing sophisticated ideas.

The first step in improving a candidate’s vocabulary is to assess it. While contemporary vocabulary tests are single response tests, which prompt a candidate to identify meaning of a word in the context of multiple choices, research indicates that a narrative style test where a candidate speaks freely on a topic is far more effective. Today, we are taking a major step to address this gap by adding a vocabulary assessment score to our spontaneous speech fluency assessment API. This new capability can be utilized in a wide range of scenarios including recruitment, spoken English assessment in K-12 and speech impairment assessment by speech therapists.

Our vocabulary score approximates the IELTS speaking vocabulary rubric and rates a candidate’s vocabulary on a scale of 0-9. To obtain the vocabulary score, users have to call our API with a free speech audio sample in which a candidate is speaking on any topic of interest. Our API will then automatically transcribe the speech sample and provide a vocabulary score along with other metrics such as fluency, pronunciation accuracy and speaking rate. We went a step further and also provide a vocabulary score for each sentence/segment in the candidate’s speech. You may review the below examples to get a sense of API response:

a. Basic student audio sample – Vocab score 4.9

For a simple audio sample such as above, the API will return a vocabulary score of 4.9 .

b. A more sophisticated news audio sample – Vocab score 7.3

For the above audio sample, the API will return a vocabulary score of 7.3

Contact us today to give us feedback, request an API key or learn more about our vocabulary assessment capabilities. We would love to hear from you!

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