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arXiv · 2305.10659

Use of Speech Impairment Severity for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

Mengzhe Geng·Zengrui Jin·Tianzi Wang·Shujie Hu·Jiajun Deng·Mingyu Cui·Guinan Li·Jianwei Yu·Xurong Xie·Xunying Liu
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Abstract

A key challenge in dysarthric speech recognition is the speaker-level diversity attributed to both speaker-identity associated factors such as gender, and speech impairment severity. Most prior researches on addressing this issue focused on using speaker-identity only. To this end, this paper proposes a novel set of techniques to use both severity and speaker-identity in dysarthric speech recognition: a) multitask training incorporating severity prediction error; b) speaker-severity aware auxiliary feature adaptation; and c) structured LHUC transforms separately conditioned on speaker-identity and severity. Experiments conducted on UASpeech suggest incorporating additional speech impairment severity into state-of-the-art hybrid DNN, E2E Conformer and pre-trained Wav2vec 2.0 ASR systems produced statistically significant WER reductions up to 4.78% (14.03% relative). Using the best system the lowest published WER of 17.82% (51.25% on very low intelligibility) was obtained on UASpeech.

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Mengzhe Geng, Zengrui Jin, Tianzi Wang, Shujie Hu, Jiajun Deng, Mingyu Cui, Guinan Li, Jianwei Yu, Xurong Xie, Xunying Liu. 2023-05-18. Use of Speech Impairment Severity for Dysarthric Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10659

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