Perceptual evaluation for automatic anomaly detection in disordered speech: Focus on ambiguous cases

Publication date: December 2018Source: Speech Communication, Volume 105Author(s): Imed Laaridh, Christine Meunier, Corinne FredouilleAbstractPerceptual evaluation is still the most common method in clinical practice for diagnosing and following the condition progression of people suffering from dysarthria (or speech disorders more generally). Such evaluations are frequently described as non-trivial, subjective and highly time-consuming (depending on the evaluation level). Most of the time, perceptual assessment is performed individually by clinicians which can be problematic since judgment may vary from one clinician to the other. Clinicians have therefore expressed the need for new objective evaluation tools better adapted to longitudinal studies, the observation of small units and rehabilitation context to monitor patients’ progress. We have previously proposed an automatic approach to the anomaly detection at the phone level for dysarthric speech. The system behavior was studied and validated with different corpora and speech styles and shows good results in this specific task. Nonetheless, the lack of annotated French dysarthric speech corpora has limited our ability to analyze some aspects of its behavior, such as severity, more precisely (more anomalies are detected automatically compared with human experts). To overcome this limitation, we proposed an original perceptual evaluation protocol applied to a limited set of decisions made by the automatic system, relating ...
Source: Speech Communication - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research