Generating synthetic dysarthric speech to overcome dysarthria acoustic data scarcity

Autor: Dhruv Phadnis, Andrew Hu, Seyed Reza Shahamiri
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. 14:6751-6768
ISSN: 1868-5145
1868-5137
DOI: 10.1007/s12652-021-03542-w
Popis: Dysarthria is a disorder that affects an individual’s speech intelligibility due to the paralysis of muscles and organs involved in the articulation process. As the condition is often associated with physically debilitating disabilities, performing daily tasks can become challenging. Not only do such individuals face communication problems, but interactions with digital devices can also become a burden. For such individuals, speech-to-text and text-to-normal-speech technologies can make a significant difference as computers and smartphones may become an interaction medium, enabling them to communicate. However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies designed to understand normal speakers are incapable of perceiving dysarthric speech, and other attempts to design dysarthric ASR systems have progressed slowly, mainly due to the scarcity of dysarthric speech. As these systems’ performances rely heavily on dysarthric speech samples for training, generating synthetic dysarthric speech can significantly boost their efficiencies. This paper reports on adapting normal speech generation systems to produce dysarthric speech utilizing transfer learning and considering both subjective and objective evaluations. The results reveal that the syntactically produced dysarthric speech improved our novel dysarthric ASR accuracy by up to 5.67% for severe dysarthria, which has traditionally been the most challenging type of dysarthric speech to recognize. Adopting this study’s findings, other researchers can produce an unlimited amount of synthetic dysarthric speech by capturing a limited amount of speech data from dysarthric individuals and utilizing synthetic data to tackle the data scarcity problem in their studies.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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