Cited by 52Voice and Speech DisordersSpeech and Audio ProcessingSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

Spectro-Temporal Sparsity Characterization for Dysarthric Speech Detection

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Kodrasi, Ina, Bourlard, Herve·2020·IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

Abstract

To assist the clinical diagnosis and treatment of neurological diseases that cause speech dysarthria such as Parkinson's disease (PD), it is of paramount importance to craft robust features which can be used to automatically discriminate between healthy and dysarthric speech. Since dysarthric speech of patients suffering from PD is breathy, semi-whispery, and is characterized by abnormal pauses and imprecise articulation, it can be expected that its spectro-temporal sparsity differs from the spectro-temporal sparsity of healthy speech. While we have recently successfully used temporal sparsity characterization for dysarthric speech detection, characterizing spectral sparsity poses the challenge of constructing a valid feature vector from signals with a different number of unaligned time frames. Further, although several non-parametric and parametric measures of sparsity exist, it is unknown which sparsity measure yields the best performance in the context of dysarthric speech detection. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the advantages of spectro-temporal sparsity characterization for automatic dysarthric speech detection. To this end, we first provide a numerical analysis of the suitability of different non-parametric and parametric measures (i.e., l1-norm, kurtosis, Shannon entropy, Gini index, shape parameter of a Chi distribution, and shape parameter of a Weibull distribution) for sparsity characterization. It is shown that kurtosis, the Gini index, and the parametric sparsity measures are advantageous sparsity measures, whereas the l1-norm and entropy measures fail to robustly characterize the temporal sparsity of signals with a different number of time frames. Second, we propose to characterize the spectral sparsity of an utterance by initially time-aligning it to the same utterance uttered by a (arbitrarily selected) reference speaker using dynamic time warping. Experimental results on a Spanish database of healthy and dysarthric speech show that estimating the spectro-temporal sparsity using the Gini index or the parametric sparsity measures and using it as a feature in a support vector machine results in a high classification accuracy of 83.3%.

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  • Sources of variability commonly found in normal speech, including accent or gender, when compounded with variability over age and speech pathology severity, create large diversity among dysarthric and elderly speakers.

    “Sources of variability commonly found in normal speech including accent or gender, when further compounded with those over age and speech pathology severity, create large diversity among dysarthric and elderly speakers [39], [51].”

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Authors
Kodrasi, I., & Bourlard, H.
Affiliations
Idiap Research Institute (CH)
Venue
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Published
2020
Volume
28
Pages
1210-1222
ISSN
  • 2329-9290 (ISSN-L)
  • 2329-9304
OpenAlex
W3015342653
Cited by
52
References
46
Citations by year
2026: 7 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 4
FWCI
4.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (publishedVersion)
  • Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Funders
  • Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (CRSII5_173711)
  • MoSpeeDi
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Voice and Speech Disorders
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
Parkinson's disease, spectral sparsity, temporal sparsity, sparsity measures, kurtosis, Gini coefficient, Weibull distribution, chi distribution, dynamic time warping, temporal alignment, speech features, support vector machine classification

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