Related papers: Inappropriate Pause Detection In Dysarthric Speech…

Speech intelligibility assessment plays an important role in the therapy of patients suffering from pathological speech disorders. Automatic and objective measures are desirable to assist therapists in their traditionally subjective and…

Training machine learning algorithms for speech applications requires large, labeled training data sets. This is problematic for clinical applications where obtaining such data is prohibitively expensive because of privacy concerns or lack…

Automatic techniques in the context of motor speech disorders (MSDs) are typically two-class techniques aiming to discriminate between dysarthria and neurotypical speech or between dysarthria and apraxia of speech (AoS). Further, although…

Hypernasality is a common characteristic symptom across many motor-speech disorders. For voiced sounds, hypernasality introduces an additional resonance in the lower frequencies and, for unvoiced sounds, there is reduced articulatory…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is becoming a ubiquitous technology. Although its accuracy is closing the gap with that of human level under certain settings, one area that can further improve is to incorporate user-specific…

We present a comprehensive evaluation of pretrained speech embedding systems for the detection of dysarthric speech using existing accessible data. Dysarthric speech datasets are often small and can suffer from recording biases as well as…

Although personalized automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have recently been designed to recognize even severely impaired speech, model performance may degrade over time for persons with degenerating speech. The aims of this study…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts often contain disfluencies, such as fillers, repetitions, and false starts, which reduce readability and hinder downstream applications like chatbots and voice assistants. If left unaddressed,…

Dysarthric speech detection (DSD) systems aim to detect characteristics of the neuromotor disorder from speech. Such systems are particularly susceptible to domain mismatch where the training and testing data come from the source and target…

Aphasia is a common speech and language disorder, typically caused by a brain injury or a stroke, that affects millions of people worldwide. Detecting and assessing Aphasia in patients is a difficult, time-consuming process, and numerous…

In this thesis, we present a statistical language model for resolving speech repairs, intonational boundaries and discourse markers. Rather than finding the best word interpretation for an acoustic signal, we redefine the speech recognition…

Despite significant advances in recent years, the existing Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) methods detect pronunciation errors with a relatively low accuracy (precision of 60% at 40%-80% recall). This Ph.D. work proposes…

Disordered speech recognition is a highly challenging task. The underlying neuro-motor conditions of people with speech disorders, often compounded with co-occurring physical disabilities, lead to the difficulty in collecting large…

Recent advances in speech-aware language models have coupled strong acoustic encoders with large language models, enabling systems that move beyond transcription to produce richer outputs. Among these, word-level timestamp prediction is…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, increasingly prevalent in education, healthcare, employment, and mobile technology, face significant challenges in inclusivity, particularly for the 80 million-strong global community of people…

This study investigates the impact of integrating a dataset of disordered speech recordings ($\sim$1,000 hours) into the fine-tuning of a near state-of-the-art ASR baseline system. Contrary to what one might expect, despite the data being…

Formal thought disorder (FTD), a hallmark of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, manifests as incoherent speech and poses challenges for clinical assessment. Traditional clinical rating scales, though validated, are resource-intensive and…

Speech impairments resulting from congenital disorders, such as cerebral palsy, down syndrome, or apert syndrome, as well as acquired brain injuries due to stroke, traumatic accidents, or tumors, present major challenges to automatic speech…

Interactive voice assistants have been widely used as input interfaces in various scenarios, e.g. on smart homes devices, wearables and on AR devices. Detecting the end of a speech query, i.e. speech end-pointing, is an important task for…

We propose a new paradigm for maintaining speaker identity in dysarthric voice conversion (DVC). The poor quality of dysarthric speech can be greatly improved by statistical VC, but as the normal speech utterances of a dysarthria patient…