Use of Speech Impairment Severity for Dysarthric Speech Recognition
Mengzhe Geng Zengrui Jin Tianzi Wang Shujie Hu Jiajun Deng Mingyu Cui Guinan Li Jianwei Yu Xurong Xie Xunying Liu
A key challenge in dysarthric speech recognition is the speaker-level
diversity attributed to both speaker-identity associated factors such as
gender, and speech impairment severity. Most prior researches on addressing
this issue focused on using speaker-identity only. To this end, this paper
proposes a novel set of techniques to use both severity and speaker-identity in
dysarthric speech recognition: a) multitask training incorporating severity
prediction error; b) speaker-severity aware auxiliary feature adaptation; and
c) structured LHUC transforms separately conditioned on speaker-identity and
severity. Experiments conducted on UASpeech suggest incorporating additional
speech impairment severity into state-of-the-art hybrid DNN, E2E Conformer and
pre-trained Wav2vec 2.0 ASR systems produced statistically significant WER
reductions up to 4.78% (14.03% relative). Using the best system the lowest
published WER of 17.82% (51.25% on very low intelligibility) was obtained on
UASpeech.