DETECTION OF FILLERS IN THE SPEECH BY PEOPLE WHO STUTTER

Stuttering is a speech impediment that is a very complex disorder. It is difficult to diagnose and treat, and is of unknown initiation, despite the large number of studies in this field. Stuttering can take many forms and varies from person to person, and it can change under the influence of external factors. Diagnosing and treating speech disorders such as stuttering requires from a speech therapist, not only good profes-sional preparation, but also experience gained through research and practice in the field. The use of acoustic methods in combination with elements of artificial intelligence makes it possible to objectively assess the disorder, as well as to control the effects of treatment. The main aim of the study was to present an algorithm for automatic recognition of fillers disfluency in the statements of people who stutter. This is done on the basis of their parameterized features in the amplitude-frequency space. The work provides as well, exemplary results demonstrating their possibility and effectiveness. In order to verify and optimize the procedures, the statements of seven stutterers with duration of 2 to 4 minutes were selected. Over 70% efficiency and predictability of automatic detection of these disfluencies was achieved. The use of an automatic method in conjunction with therapy for a stuttering person can give us the opportunity to objectively assess the disorder, as well as to evaluate the progress of therapy

A lightly supervised approach to detect stuttering in children's speech

© 2018 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved. In speech pathology, new assistive technologies using ASR and machine learning approaches are being developed for detecting speech disorder events. Classically-trained ASR model tends to remove disfluencies from spoken utterances, due to its focus on producing clean and readable text output. However, diagnostic systems need to be able to track speech disfluencies, such as stuttering events, in order to determine the severity level of stuttering. To achieve this, ASR systems must be adapted to recognise full verbatim utterances, including pseudo-words and non-meaningful part-words. This work proposes a training regime to address this problem, and preserve a full verbatim output of stuttering speech. We use a lightly-supervised approach using task-oriented lattices to recognise the stuttering speech of children performing a standard reading task. This approach improved the WER by 27.8% relative to a baseline that uses word-lattices generated from the original prompt. The improved results preserved 63% of stuttering events (including sound, word, part-word and phrase repetition, and revision). This work also proposes a separate correction layer on top of the ASR that detects prolongation events (which are poorly recog-nised by the ASR). This increases the percentage of preserved stuttering events to 70%

Systematic Review of Machine Learning Approaches for Detecting Developmental Stuttering

A systematic review of the literature on statistical and machine learning schemes for identifying symptoms of developmental stuttering from audio recordings is reported. Twenty-seven papers met the quality standards that were set. Comparison of results across studies was not possible because training and testing data, model architecture and feature inputs varied across studies. The limitations that were identified for comparison across studies included: no indication of application for the work, data were selected for training and testing models in ways that could lead to biases, studies used different datasets and attempted to locate different symptom types, feature inputs were reported in different ways and there was no standard way of reporting performance statistics. Recommendations were made about how these problems can be addressed in future work on this topic