The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English".
That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China.
Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that. And if language families exist upon a continuum - there must be some point on that continuum where you are no longer speaking English, but say Scots or Friesian or Nigerian Creole instead. Accents close to those points are objectively stronger.
But there is a lot of freedom in how you measure centrality - if you weight by number of speakers, you might expect to get some mid-American or mid-Atlantic accent, but wind up with the dialect of semi-literate Hyderabad call centre workers.
> Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that
Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? At least from the article is saying, it is measuring the strength of the user's American English accent (maybe GenAm?), and there is no discussion of any user choice of native accent to target.
No, I don't think it is doing that, I'm just taking issue with cccpurcell, who seems to believe that any definition of accent strength is chauvinistic.
Indeed, although the inference output of the model is based on the ratings input that we trained it on. And that rating input was done by American English native speakers, so this iteration of the model is centered towards those accents more than e.g. UK or Australian or other accents of English from outside the US.
That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China.
Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that. And if language families exist upon a continuum - there must be some point on that continuum where you are no longer speaking English, but say Scots or Friesian or Nigerian Creole instead. Accents close to those points are objectively stronger.
But there is a lot of freedom in how you measure centrality - if you weight by number of speakers, you might expect to get some mid-American or mid-Atlantic accent, but wind up with the dialect of semi-literate Hyderabad call centre workers.