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 labor-intensive assessments. In this work, we investigate a novel approach
for obtaining such a measure using the divergence in disentangled latent speech
representations of a parallel utterance pair, obtained from a healthy reference
and a pathological speaker. Experiments on an English database of Cerebral
Palsy patients, using all available utterances per speaker, show high and
significant correlation values (R = -0.9) with subjective intelligibility
measures, while having only minimal deviation (+-0.01) across four different
reference speaker pairs. We also demonstrate the robustness of the proposed
method (R = -0.89 deviating +-0.02 over 1000 iterations) by considering a
significantly smaller amount of utterances per speaker. Our results are among
the first to show that disentangled speech representations can be used for
automatic pathological speech intelligibility assessment, resulting in a
reference speaker pair invariant method, applicable in scenarios with only few
utterances available.

使用网络的解耦语音表示方法，从大量不同发言者收集到的语音数据中，实现对小量特定发言者语音智力的客观量化计算。

自动病理可懂性评估的解缠离散语音表征

Disentangled Latent Speech Representation for Automatic Pathological Intelligibility Assessment

Automatic recognition of disordered speech remains a highly challenging task
to date. Sources of variability commonly found in normal speech including
accent, age or gender, when further compounded with the underlying causes of
speech impairment and varying severity levels, create large diversity among
speakers. To this end, speaker adaptation techniques play a vital role in
current speech recognition systems. Motivated by the spectro-temporal level
differences between disordered and normal speech that systematically manifest
in articulatory imprecision, decreased volume and clarity, slower speaking
rates and increased dysfluencies, novel spectro-temporal subspace basis
embedding deep features derived by SVD decomposition of speech spectrum are
proposed to facilitate both accurate speech intelligibility assessment and
auxiliary feature based speaker adaptation of state-of-the-art hybrid DNN and
end-to-end disordered speech recognition systems. Experiments conducted on the
UASpeech corpus suggest the proposed spectro-temporal deep feature adapted
systems consistently outperformed baseline i-Vector adaptation by up to 2.63%
absolute (8.6% relative) reduction in word error rate (WER) with or without
data augmentation. Learning hidden unit contribution (LHUC) based speaker
adaptation was further applied. The final speaker adapted system using the
proposed spectral basis embedding features gave an overall WER of 25.6% on the
UASpeech test set of 16 dysarthric speakers

本文研究基于 SVD 分解的深度学习算法，用于自动识别语音障碍人士的语音，并且使用该算法提高了基于语音识别的自适应技术在该领域中的性能。