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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2021.13.2.057

Automatic severity classification of dysarthria using voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation features  

Yeo, Eun Jung (Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University)
Kim, Sunhee (Department of French Language Education, Seoul National University)
Chung, Minhwa (Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.13, no.2, 2021 , pp. 57-66 More about this Journal
Abstract
This study focuses on the issue of automatic severity classification of dysarthric speakers based on speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility is a complex measure that is affected by the features of multiple speech dimensions. However, most previous studies are restricted to using features from a single speech dimension. To effectively capture the characteristics of the speech disorder, we extracted features of multiple speech dimensions: voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation. Voice quality consists of jitter, shimmer, Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR), number of voice breaks, and degree of voice breaks. Prosody includes speech rate (total duration, speech duration, speaking rate, articulation rate), pitch (F0 mean/std/min/max/med/25quartile/75 quartile), and rhythm (%V, deltas, Varcos, rPVIs, nPVIs). Pronunciation contains Percentage of Correct Phonemes (Percentage of Correct Consonants/Vowels/Total phonemes) and degree of vowel distortion (Vowel Space Area, Formant Centralized Ratio, Vowel Articulatory Index, F2-Ratio). Experiments were conducted using various feature combinations. The experimental results indicate that using features from all three speech dimensions gives the best result, with a 80.15 F1-score, compared to using features from just one or two speech dimensions. The result implies voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation features should all be considered in automatic severity classification of dysarthria.
Keywords
dysarthria; automatic severity classification; speech dimensions; machine learning; feature selection;
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