INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Spectral Features for Automatic Blind Intelligibility Estimation of Spastic Dysarthric Speech

Richard Hummel (1), Wai-Yip Chan (1), Tiago H. Falk (2)

(1) Queen's University, Canada
(2) INRS-EMT, Canada

In this paper, we explore the use of the standard ITU-T P.563 speech quality estimation algorithm for automatic assessment of dysarthric speech intelligibility. A linear mapping consisting of three salient P.563 internal features is proposed and shown to accurately estimate spastic dysarthric speech intelligibility. Delta-energy features are further proposed in order to characterize the atypical spectral dynamics and limited vowel space observed with spastic dysarthria. Experiments using the publicly-available Universal Access database (10 speaker patients) show that when salient delta-energy and internal P.563 features are used, correlations with subjective intelligibility ratings as high as 0.98 can be attained.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hummel, Richard / Chan, Wai-Yip / Falk, Tiago H. (2011): "Spectral features for automatic blind intelligibility estimation of spastic dysarthric speech", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 3017-3020.