Enhancing Speech Assistive Systems Through a Sequence-to-Vector Representation Approach for Disordered Speech
Abstract
Speech assistive system for people with neuro disorders is a highly challenging task till date. Any kind of neuro cognitive disability affects the speech production mechanism that leads to speech impairment. Representation learning methods have recently emerged to improve the outcome of machine learning algorithms. In case of complex recognition tasks such as disordered speech recognition, learning compact and efficient representations for disordered speech utterances is important. Recent deep learning-based architectures need sufficiently large amount of impaired speech samples which are tedious with respect to neurologically disabled people. In this work, we focus on proposing a representation learning approach that uses traditional sequential model such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) which works moderately well with small amount of impaired speech data. We propose a novel sequence to vector-based HMM State Sequence (HMM-SS) approach which is very compact and has proved to be an efficient representation for disordered speech utterances. The efficiency of the proposed HMM-SS approach is assessed using four datasets, namely 50 words of TORGO, 100-common words dataset of the UA-SPEECH, 50 help-seeking words and 100-common words of Impaired speech corpus in Tamil corpus. The proposed approach outperforms the baseline HMM, DNN-HMM and a recent state-of-the-art approach for all four datasets. The discriminative ability and the compactness of the proposed representation proved effective for disordered speech recognition.
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