Speech Recognition (ASR) due to phoneme distortions and high variability. While self-supervised ASR models like Wav2Vec, HuBERT, and Whisper have shown promise, their effectiveness in dysarthric speech remains unclear. This study systematically benchmarks these models with different decoding strategies, including CTC, seq2seq, and LLM-enhanced decoding (BART,GPT-2, Vicuna). Our contributions include (1) benchmarking ASR architectures for dysarthric speech, (2) introducing LLM-based decoding to improve intelligibility, (3) analyzing generalization across datasets, and (4) providing insights into recognition errors across severity levels. Findings highlight that LLM-enhanced decoding improves dysarthric ASR by leveraging linguistic constraints for phoneme restoration and grammatical correction.
Dysarthric speech recognition has posed major challenges due to lack of training data and heavy mismatch in speaker characteristics. Recent ASR systems have benefited from readily available pretrained models such as wav2vec2 to improve the recognition performance. Speaker adaptation using fMLLR and xvectors have provided major gains for dysarthric speech with very little adaptation data. However, integration of wav2vec2 with fMLLR features or xvectors during wav2vec2 finetuning is yet to be explored. In this work, we propose a simple adaptation network for fine-tuning wav2vec2 using fMLLR feat…
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 …
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…
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…
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）
Cross-Dataset, Age, and Gender Generalization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Low-Resource Children's ASR
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Sikkim, India（印度西西姆国立技术学院电子与通信工程系）；Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA（美国南加州大学洛杉矶分校信号分析与解释实验室）
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…
Improved Dysarthric Speech to Text Conversion via TTS Personalization
Department of Telecommunications and Artificial Intelligence, Budapest University of Technology, Hungary（电信与人工智能系，布达佩斯技术大学）；Division of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden（语音、音乐与听觉 division，皇家理工学院）；Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, HUN-REN, Hungary（匈牙利语言研究与应用中心）；SpeechTex Ltd., Hungary（SpeechTex有限公司）；Institute of Informatics, University of Szeged, Hungary（信息学院，塞格德大学）
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…
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…
Benchmarking Commercial Speech Recognition and Multimodal Large Language Models on Dysarthric Speech: Severity-Stratified Baselines and Architecture-Specific Prompting Effects
Institute of Psychology（心理研究所）；University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Beijing Union University（北京联合大学）；Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In this paper, we present a new open source toolkit for speech recognition, named CAT (CTC-CRF based ASR Toolkit). CAT inherits the data-efficiency of the hybrid approach and the simplicity of the E2E approach, providing a full-fledged implementation of CTC-CRFs and complete training and testing scripts for a number of English and Chinese benchmarks. Experiments show CAT obtains state-of-the-art results, which are comparable to the fine-tuned hybrid models in Kaldi but with a much simpler training pipeline. Compared to existing non-modularized E2E models, CAT performs better on limited-scale d…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Meta AI
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a task aiming to extract high-level semantics from spoken utterances. Previous works have investigated the use of speech self-supervised models and textual pre-trained models, which have shown reasonable improvements to various SLU tasks. However, because of the mismatched modalities between speech signals and text tokens, previous methods usually need complex designs of the frameworks. This work proposes a simple yet efficient unsupervised paradigm that connects speech and textual pre-trained models, resulting in an unsupervised speech-to-semantic pre-tr…
Streaming end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are widely used in everyday applications that require transcribing speech to text in real-time. Their minimal latency makes them suitable for such tasks. Unlike their non-streaming counterparts, streaming models are constrained to be causal with no future context and suffer from higher word error rates (WER). To improve streaming models, a recent study [1] proposed to distill a non-streaming teacher model on unsupervised utterances, and then train a streaming student using the teachers' predictions. However, the performance gap be…
Leveraging LLM for Stuttering Speech: A Unified Architecture Bridging Recognition and Event Detection
Beijing Fosafer Information Technology Co., Ltd.（北京福赛弗信息技术有限公司）；China Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Public Security（中国公安部 forensic 科学研究院）；The Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences（中国社会科学院语言研究所）
本文提出一种 LLM 驱动的 ASR-SED 多任务学习框架，通过动态交互机制联合优化口吃语音识别与事件检测，在 AS-70 数据集上将 ASR CER 降至 5.45% 并提升 SED F1 至 73.63%。
Reducing the Gap Between Pretrained Speech Enhancement and Recognition Models Using a Real Speech-Trained Bridging Module
Tianjin University（天津大学）；DiDi Chuxing（滴滴出行）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Huiyan Technology (Tianjin) Co., Ltd（慧研科技（天津）有限公司）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
针对预训练语音增强与 ASR 模型间因模拟训练数据不匹配导致的性能损失，提出用 DNSMOS 和多任务 WER 向量在真实带噪语音上训练 OA 桥接模块，在 CHiME-4 上显著降低 WER。
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）
Automatic recognition of disordered speech remains a highly challenging task to date. The underlying neuro-motor conditions, often compounded with co-occurring physical disabilities, lead to the difficulty in collecting large quantities of impaired speech required for ASR system development. This paper presents novel variational auto-encoder generative adversarial network (VAE-GAN) based personalized disordered speech augmentation approaches that simultaneously learn to encode, generate and discriminate synthesized impaired speech. Separate latent features are derived to learn dysarthric speec…
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）
We investigate the performance of self-supervised pretraining frameworks on pathological speech datasets used for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Modern end-to-end models require thousands of hours of data to train well, but only a small number of pathological speech datasets are publicly available. A proven solution to this problem is by first pretraining the model on a huge number of healthy speech datasets and then fine-tuning it on the pathological speech datasets. One new pretraining framework called self-supervised learning (SSL) trains a network using only speech data, providing mor…
Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Diffusion-Based Speech Enhancement for Dysarthric Speech
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Erasmus Medical Centre (EMC)（埃因霍温医学院）；Indian Inst. of Information Technology Allahabad（阿利哈巴德信息科技学院）；Dept. of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery（整形外科与重建外科系）；Dept. of Electronics and Communication（电子与通信系）
