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)