X-MDD: LLM-Based Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis for Unseen Languages with Canonical References

Abstract: Mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) provides phone-level feedback to language learners, but extending it to new languages typically requires collecting and annotating learner speech for each target language. This repeated annotation effort is costly and limits the language coverage of pronunciation feedback. We study whether MDD capabilities learned from annotated learner speech can be applied to languages unseen during MDD training when canonical pronunciation references are available. Our multilingual LLM-based model, X-MDD, uses canonical speech and phones as references to predict the phone sequence actually produced by a learner. It incorporates in-context demonstrations for inference-time adaptation and is further optimized with group relative policy optimization (GRPO) using detection F1 and phone error rate. We further analyze how canonical inputs affect prediction and find that (1) canonical speech and phones jointly contribute to actual-phone prediction, and (2) conflicting speech evidence reduces the tendency to copy canonical phones. Trained only on Mandarin and English, X-MDD achieves a detection F1 of 38.07 on Arabic Qur'anic recitation, compared with 44.14 for a supervised challenge baseline trained on Arabic. It also achieves F1 scores of 78.68 and 58.78 on Mandarin and English, respectively, demonstrating effective multilingual MDD within a single model.