INTERSPEECH 2007 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Antwerp, Belgium August 27-31, 2007

Automatic Scoring of the Intelligibility in Patients with Cancer of the Oral Cavity

Andreas Maier, Maria Schuster, Anton Batliner, Elmar Nöth, Emeka Nkenke

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

After surgical treatment of cancer of the oral cavity patients often suffer from functional restrictions such as speech disorders. In this paper we present a novel approach to assess the outcome of the treatment w.r.t. the intelligibility of the patient using the result of an automatic speech recognition system. The word recognition rate was taken as intelligibility score. Compared to four speech experts this method yields results that are as good as the best speech expert compared to the other experts. The correlation between our system and the mean opinion of the experts is .92. Furthermore we show that our system has better performance than the average expert and is more reliable.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Maier, Andreas / Schuster, Maria / Batliner, Anton / Nöth, Elmar / Nkenke, Emeka (2007): "Automatic scoring of the intelligibility in patients with cancer of the oral cavity", In INTERSPEECH-2007, 1206-1209.