49 research outputs found

    A Few-Shot Approach to Dysarthric Speech Intelligibility Level Classification Using Transformers

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    Dysarthria is a speech disorder that hinders communication due to difficulties in articulating words. Detection of dysarthria is important for several reasons as it can be used to develop a treatment plan and help improve a person's quality of life and ability to communicate effectively. Much of the literature focused on improving ASR systems for dysarthric speech. The objective of the current work is to develop models that can accurately classify the presence of dysarthria and also give information about the intelligibility level using limited data by employing a few-shot approach using a transformer model. This work also aims to tackle the data leakage that is present in previous studies. Our whisper-large-v2 transformer model trained on a subset of the UASpeech dataset containing medium intelligibility level patients achieved an accuracy of 85%, precision of 0.92, recall of 0.8 F1-score of 0.85, and specificity of 0.91. Experimental results also demonstrate that the model trained using the 'words' dataset performed better compared to the model trained on the 'letters' and 'digits' dataset. Moreover, the multiclass model achieved an accuracy of 67%.Comment: Paper has been presented at ICCCNT 2023 and the final version will be published in IEEE Digital Library Xplor

    Wav2vec-based Detection and Severity Level Classification of Dysarthria from Speech

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    Automatic detection and severity level classification of dysarthria directly from acoustic speech signals can be used as a tool in medical diagnosis. In this work, the pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 model is studied as a feature extractor to build detection and severity level classification systems for dysarthric speech. The experiments were carried out with the popularly used UA-speech database. In the detection experiments, the results revealed that the best performance was obtained using the embeddings from the first layer of the wav2vec model that yielded an absolute improvement of 1.23% in accuracy compared to the best performing baseline feature (spectrogram). In the studied severity level classification task, the results revealed that the embeddings from the final layer gave an absolute improvement of 10.62% in accuracy compared to the best baseline features (mel-frequency cepstral coefficients)

    Modeling Sub-Band Information Through Discrete Wavelet Transform to Improve Intelligibility Assessment of Dysarthric Speech

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    The speech signal within a sub-band varies at a fine level depending on the type, and level of dysarthria. The Mel-frequency filterbank used in the computation process of cepstral coefficients smoothed out this fine level information in the higher frequency regions due to the larger bandwidth of filters. To capture the sub-band information, in this paper, four-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposition is firstly performed to decompose the input speech signal into approximation and detail coefficients, respectively, at each level. For a particular input speech signal, five speech signals representing different sub-bands are then reconstructed using inverse DWT (IDWT). The log filterbank energies are computed by analyzing the short-term discrete Fourier transform magnitude spectra of each reconstructed speech using a 30-channel Mel-filterbank. For each analysis frame, the log filterbank energies obtained across all reconstructed speech signals are pooled together, and discrete cosine transform is performed to represent the cepstral feature, here termed as discrete wavelet transform reconstructed (DWTR)- Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC). The i-vector based dysarthric level assessment system developed on the universal access speech corpus shows that the proposed DTWRMFCC feature outperforms the conventional MFCC and several other cepstral features reported for a similar task. The usages of DWTR- MFCC improve the detection accuracy rate (DAR) of the dysarthric level assessment system in the text and the speaker-independent test case to 60.094 % from 56.646 % MFCC baseline. Further analysis of the confusion matrices shows that confusion among different dysarthric classes is quite different for MFCC and DWTR-MFCC features. Motivated by this observation, a two-stage classification approach employing discriminating power of both kinds of features is proposed to improve the overall performance of the developed dysarthric level assessment system. The two-stage classification scheme further improves the DAR to 65.813 % in the text and speaker- independent test case

    Speech Intelligibility Assessment of Dysarthric Speech by using Goodness of Pronunciation with Uncertainty Quantification

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    This paper proposes an improved Goodness of Pronunciation (GoP) that utilizes Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) for automatic speech intelligibility assessment for dysarthric speech. Current GoP methods rely heavily on neural network-driven overconfident predictions, which is unsuitable for assessing dysarthric speech due to its significant acoustic differences from healthy speech. To alleviate the problem, UQ techniques were used on GoP by 1) normalizing the phoneme prediction (entropy, margin, maxlogit, logit-margin) and 2) modifying the scoring function (scaling, prior normalization). As a result, prior-normalized maxlogit GoP achieves the best performance, with a relative increase of 5.66%, 3.91%, and 23.65% compared to the baseline GoP for English, Korean, and Tamil, respectively. Furthermore, phoneme analysis is conducted to identify which phoneme scores significantly correlate with intelligibility scores in each language.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

    Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications

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    This book of Proceedings collects the papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications, MAVEBA 2003, held 10-12 December 2003, Firenze, Italy. The workshop is organised every two years, and aims to stimulate contacts between specialists active in research and industrial developments, in the area of voice analysis for biomedical applications. The scope of the Workshop includes all aspects of voice modelling and analysis, ranging from fundamental research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related established and advanced technologies

    Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

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    The MAVEBA Workshop proceedings, held on a biannual basis, collect the scientific papers presented both as oral and poster contributions, during the conference. The main subjects are: development of theoretical and mechanical models as an aid to the study of main phonatory dysfunctions, as well as the biomedical engineering methods for the analysis of voice signals and images, as a support to clinical diagnosis and classification of vocal pathologies

    Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications: 5th International Workshop: December 13-15, 2007, Firenze, Italy

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    The MAVEBA Workshop proceedings, held on a biannual basis, collect the scientific papers presented both as oral and poster contributions, during the conference. The main subjects are: development of theoretical and mechanical models as an aid to the study of main phonatory dysfunctions, as well as the biomedical engineering methods for the analysis of voice signals and images, as a support to clinical diagnosis and classification of vocal pathologies. The Workshop has the sponsorship of: Ente Cassa Risparmio di Firenze, COST Action 2103, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Journal (Elsevier Eds.), IEEE Biomedical Engineering Soc. Special Issues of International Journals have been, and will be, published, collecting selected papers from the conference

    Dysarthric speech classification from coded telephone speech using glottal features

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    This paper proposes a new dysarthric speech classification method from coded telephone speech using glottal features. The proposed method utilizes glottal features, which are efficiently estimated from coded telephone speech using a recently proposed deep neural net-based glottal inverse filtering method. Two sets of glottal features were considered: (1) time- and frequency-domain parameters and (2) parameters based on principal component analysis (PCA). In addition, acoustic features are extracted from coded telephone speech using the openSMILE toolkit. The proposed method utilizes both acoustic and glottal features extracted from coded speech utterances and their corresponding dysarthric/healthy labels to train support vector machine classifiers. Separate classifiers are trained using both individual, and the combination of glottal and acoustic features. The coded telephone speech used in the experiments is generated using the adaptive multi-rate codec, which operates in two transmission bandwidths: narrowband (300 Hz - 3.4 kHz) and wideband (50 Hz - 7 kHz). The experiments were conducted using dysarthric and healthy speech utterances of the TORGO and universal access speech (UA-Speech) databases. Classification accuracy results indicated the effectiveness of glottal features in the identification of dysarthria from coded telephone speech. The results also showed that the glottal features in combination with the openSMILE-based acoustic features resulted in improved classification accuracies, which validate the complementary nature of glottal features. The proposed dysarthric speech classification method can potentially be employed in telemonitoring application for identifying the presence of dysarthria from coded telephone speech.Peer reviewe

    Personalising synthetic voices for individuals with severe speech impairment.

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    Speech technology can help individuals with speech disorders to interact more easily. Many individuals with severe speech impairment, due to conditions such as Parkinson's disease or motor neurone disease, use voice output communication aids (VOCAs), which have synthesised or pre-recorded voice output. This voice output effectively becomes the voice of the individual and should therefore represent the user accurately. Currently available personalisation of speech synthesis techniques require a large amount of data input, which is difficult to produce for individuals with severe speech impairment. These techniques also do not provide a solution for those individuals whose voices have begun to show the effects of dysarthria. The thesis shows that Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech synthesis is a promising approach for 'voice banking' for individuals before their condition causes deterioration of the speech and once deterioration has begun. Data input requirements for building personalised voices with this technique using human listener judgement evaluation is investigated. It shows that 100 sentences is the minimum required to build a significantly different voice from an average voice model and show some resemblance to the target speaker. This amount depends on the speaker and the average model used. A neural network analysis trained on extracted acoustic features revealed that spectral features had the most influence for predicting human listener judgements of similarity of synthesised speech to a target speaker. Accuracy of prediction significantly improves if other acoustic features are introduced and combined non-linearly. These results were used to inform the reconstruction of personalised synthetic voices for speakers whose voices had begun to show the effects of their conditions. Using HMM-based synthesis, personalised synthetic voices were built using dysarthric speech showing similarity to target speakers without recreating the impairment in the synthesised speech output

    ACOUSTIC SPEECH MARKERS FOR TRACKING CHANGES IN HYPOKINETIC DYSARTHRIA ASSOCIATED WITH PARKINSON’S DISEASE

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    Previous research has identified certain overarching features of hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s Disease and found it manifests differently between individuals. Acoustic analysis has often been used to find correlates of perceptual features for differential diagnosis. However, acoustic parameters that are robust for differential diagnosis may not be sensitive to tracking speech changes. Previous longitudinal studies have had limited sample sizes or variable lengths between data collection. This study focused on using acoustic correlates of perceptual features to identify acoustic markers able to track speech changes in people with Parkinson’s Disease (PwPD) over six months. The thesis presents how this study has addressed limitations of previous studies to make a novel contribution to current knowledge. Speech data was collected from 63 PwPD and 47 control speakers using an online podcast software at two time points, six months apart (T1 and T2). Recordings of a standard reading passage, minimal pairs, sustained phonation, and spontaneous speech were collected. Perceptual severity ratings were given by two speech and language therapists for T1 and T2, and acoustic parameters of voice, articulation and prosody were investigated. Two analyses were conducted: a) to identify which acoustic parameters can track perceptual speech changes over time and b) to identify which acoustic parameters can track changes in speech intelligibility over time. An additional attempt was made to identify if these parameters showed group differences for differential diagnosis between PwPD and control speakers at T1 and T2. Results showed that specific acoustic parameters in voice quality, articulation and prosody could differentiate between PwPD and controls, or detect speech changes between T1 and T2, but not both factors. However, specific acoustic parameters within articulation could detect significant group and speech change differences across T1 and T2. The thesis discusses these results, their implications, and the potential for future studies
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