English

Towards Temporally Explainable Dysarthric Speech Clarity Assessment

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-06-03 v1 Human-Computer Interaction Sound

Abstract

Dysarthria, a motor speech disorder, affects intelligibility and requires targeted interventions for effective communication. In this work, we investigate automated mispronunciation feedback by collecting a dysarthric speech dataset from six speakers reading two passages, annotated by a speech therapist with temporal markers and mispronunciation descriptions. We design a three-stage framework for explainable mispronunciation evaluation: (1) overall clarity scoring, (2) mispronunciation localization, and (3) mispronunciation type classification. We systematically analyze pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models in each stage, assessing their effectiveness in dysarthric speech evaluation (Code available at: https://github.com/augmented-human-lab/interspeech25_speechtherapy, Supplementary webpage: https://apps.ahlab.org/interspeech25_speechtherapy/). Our findings offer clinically relevant insights for automating actionable feedback for pronunciation assessment, which could enable independent practice for patients and help therapists deliver more effective interventions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.00454,
  title  = {Towards Temporally Explainable Dysarthric Speech Clarity Assessment},
  author = {Seohyun Park and Chitralekha Gupta and Michelle Kah Yian Kwan and Xinhui Fung and Alexander Wenjun Yip and Suranga Nanayakkara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00454},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted in Interspeech 2025. First two authors were equal contributors