Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment affecting millions of people. Dysarthric speech can be far less intelligible than those of non-dysarthric speakers, causing significant communication difficulties. The goal of our work is to develop a model for dysarthric to healthy speech conversion using Cycle-consistent GAN. Using 18,700 dysarthric and 8,610 healthy control Korean utterances that were recorded for the purpose of automatic recognition of voice keyboard in a previous study, the generator is trained to transform dysarthric to healthy speech in the spectral domain, which is then converted back to speech. Objective evaluation using automatic speech recognition of the generated utterance on a held-out test set shows that the recognition performance is improved compared with the original dysarthic speech after performing adversarial training, as the absolute WER has been lowered by 33.4%. It demonstrates that the proposed GAN-based conversion method is useful for improving dysarthric speech intelligibility.
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Marquette University（马凯特大学）
Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder often characterized by reduced speech intelligibility through slow, uncoordinated control of speech production muscles. Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) systems may help dysarthric talkers communicate more effectively. To have robust dysarthria-specific ASR, sufficient training speech is required, which is not readily available. Recent advances in Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis multi-speaker end-to-end TTS systems suggest the possibility of using synthesis for data augmentation. In this paper, we aim to improve multi-speaker end-to-end TTS systems to syn…
State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems perform well on healthy speech. However, the performance on impaired speech still remains an issue. The current study explores the usefulness of using Wav2Vec self-supervised speech representations as features for training an ASR system for dysarthric speech. Dysarthric speech recognition is particularly difficult as several aspects of speech such as articulation, prosody and phonation can be impaired. Specifically, we train an acoustic model with features extracted from Wav2Vec, Hubert, and the cross-lingual XLSR model. Results sugge…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Pindrop；SRI International（SRI国际）
The rapid population aging has stimulated the development of assistive devices that provide personalized medical support to the needies suffering from various etiologies. One prominent clinical application is a computer-assisted speech training system which enables personalized speech therapy to patients impaired by communicative disorders in the patient's home environment. Such a system relies on the robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to be able to provide accurate articulation feedback. With the long-term aim of developing off-the-shelf ASR systems that can be incorporated …
Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）；University of Ferrara（费拉拉大学）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；PerVoice（PerVoice公司）
In many real-world applications, the mismatch between distributions of training data (source) and test data (target) significantly degrades the performance of machine learning algorithms. In speech data, causes of this mismatch include different acoustic environments or speaker characteristics. In this paper, we address this issue in the challenging context of dysarthric speech, by multi-source domain/speaker adaptation (MSDA/MSSA). Specifically, we propose the use of an optimal-transport based approach, called MSDA via Weighted Joint Optimal Transport (MSDA-WDJOT). We confront the mismatch pr…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
In this paper, we investigate several existing and a new state-of-the-art generative adversarial network-based (GAN) voice conversion method for enhancing dysarthric speech for improved dysarthric speech recognition. We compare key components of existing methods as part of a rigorous ablation study to find the most effective solution to improve dysarthric speech recognition. We find that straightforward signal processing methods such as stationary noise removal and vocoder-based time stretching lead to dysarthric speech recognition results comparable to those obtained when using state-of-the-a…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Speech recognition systems have improved dramatically over the last few years, however, their performance is significantly degraded for the cases of accented or impaired speech. This work explores domain adversarial neural networks (DANN) for speaker-independent speech recognition on the UAS dataset of dysarthric speech. The classification task on 10 spoken digits is performed using an end-to-end CNN taking raw audio as input. The results are compared to a speaker-adaptive (SA) model as well as speaker-dependent (SD) and multi-task learning models (MTL). The experiments conducted in this paper…
Controllable Dysarthric Speech Synthesis with Patient-Specific Conditioning for Speaker-Diverse ASR Augmentation
Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（语言科学与技术系，香港理工大学）；College of Rehabilitation Medicine, Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（康复医学学院，福建中医药大学）；Department of Imaging, Rehabilitation Hospital affiliated to Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（影像科，福建中医药大学附属康复医院）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SpeechX Limited（深圳声希科技有限公司）；Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence（感知与交互智能中心）
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR), which aims to improve the quality of dysarthric speech, remains a challenge, not only because we need to restore the speech to be normal, but also must preserve the speaker's identity. The speaker representation extracted by the speaker encoder (SE) optimized for speaker verification has been explored to control the speaker identity. However, the SE may not be able to fully capture the characteristics of dysarthric speakers that are previously unseen. To address this research problem, we propose a novel multi-task learning strategy, i.e., adversarial spe…
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）
We present a voice conversion framework that converts normal speech into dysarthric speech while preserving the speaker identity. Such a framework is essential for (1) clinical decision making processes and alleviation of patient stress, (2) data augmentation for dysarthric speech recognition. This is an especially challenging task since the converted samples should capture the severity of dysarthric speech while being highly natural and possessing the speaker identity of the normal speaker. To this end, we adopted a two-stage framework, which consists of a sequence-to-sequence model and a non…
Google（谷歌）；ALS Therapy Development Institute（肌萎缩侧索硬化症治疗发展研究所）
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have dramatically improved over the last few years. ASR systems are most often trained from 'typical' speech, which means that underrepresented groups don't experience the same level of improvement. In this paper, we present and evaluate finetuning techniques to improve ASR for users with non-standard speech. We focus on two types of non-standard speech: speech from people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and accented speech. We train personalized models that achieve 62% and 35% relative WER improvement on these two groups, bringing the absolu…
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Despite the rapid progress of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in the past few decades, recognition of disordered speech remains a highly challenging task to date. Disordered speech presents a wide spectrum of challenges to current data intensive deep neural networks (DNNs) based ASR technologies that predominantly target normal speech. This paper presents recent research efforts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) to improve the performance of disordered speech recognition systems on the largest publicly available UASpeech dysarthric speech corpus. A set of novel mode…
Marwadi Education Foundation’s Group of Institution（马尔瓦迪教育基金会集团机构）
Dysarthria is malfunctioning of motor speech caused by faintness in the human nervous system. It is characterized by the slurred speech along with physical impairment which restricts their communication and creates the lack of confidence and affects the lifestyle. This paper attempt to increase the efficiency of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for unimpaired speech signal. It describes state of art of research into improving ASR for speakers with dysarthria by means of incorporated knowledge of their speech production. Hybridized approach for feature extraction and acoustic modelling…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The optimization of a wavelet-based algorithm to improve speech intelligibility along with the full data set and results are reported. The discrete-time speech signal is split into frequency sub-bands via a multi-level discrete wavelet transform. Various gains are applied to the sub-band signals before they are recombined to form a modified version of the speech. The sub-band gains are adjusted while keeping the overall signal energy unchanged, and the speech intelligibility under various background interference and simulated hearing loss conditions is enhanced and evaluated objectively and qu…
On-the-fly Routing for Zero-shot MoE Speaker Adaptation of Speech Foundation Models for Dysarthric Speech Recognition
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；China National Research Council Canada（中国国家研究委员会加拿大）；Institute of Software（软件研究所）
Structured Speaker-Deficiency Adaptation of Foundation Models for Dysarthric and Elderly Speech Recognition
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；National Research Council of Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech through In-Domain Data Augmentation
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Sikkim, India（电子与通信工程系，印度尼特拉特技术学院Sikkim分校）；Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA（信号分析与解释实验室（SAIL），美国南加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Human-Computer Communications Laboratory（人机通信实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SpeechX Limited（SpeechX有限公司）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Though significant progress has been made for the voice conversion (VC) of typical speech, VC for atypical speech, e.g., dysarthric and second-language (L2) speech, remains a challenge, since it involves correcting for atypical prosody while maintaining speaker identity. To address this issue, we propose a VC system with explicit prosodic modelling and deep speaker embedding (DSE) learning. First, a speech-encoder strives to extract robust phoneme embeddings from atypical speech. Second, a prosody corrector takes in phoneme embeddings to infer typical phoneme duration and pitch values. Third, …
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）
Despite the rapid progress of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies targeting normal speech in recent decades, accurate recognition of dysarthric and elderly speech remains highly challenging tasks to date. Sources of heterogeneity commonly found in normal speech including accent or gender, when further compounded with the variability over age and speech pathology severity level, create large diversity among speakers. To this end, speaker adaptation techniques play a key role in personalization of ASR systems for such users. Motivated by the spectro-temporal level differences between…
Systematic Study of Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Spectral Features and Acoustic Models
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Sikkim, India（电子与通信工程系，印度尼特技术学院锡金分校）；Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Aalto University, Finland（信息与通信工程系，阿尔托大学，芬兰）；Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA（信号分析与解释实验室（SAIL），美国南加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Non-intrusive intelligibility prediction is important for its application in realistic scenarios, where a clean reference signal is difficult to access. The construction of many non-intrusive predictors require either ground truth intelligibility labels or clean reference signals for supervised learning. In this work, we leverage an unsupervised uncertainty estimation method for predicting speech intelligibility, which does not require intelligibility labels or reference signals to train the predictor. Our experiments demonstrate that the uncertainty from state-of-the-art end-to-end automatic …
