Spectro-Temporal Representation of Speech for Intelligibility Assessment of Dysarthria

Abstract

Recently, spectro-temporal representation of speech has been used in many fields of speech processing. Owing to this, we explore the use of spectro-temporal representation for speech intelligibility assessment especially for dysarthric speech. In this work, we investigate the use of spectro-temporal representations to evaluate intelligibility levels using artificial neural network (ANN) and convolutional neural network (CNN). Standard American English dysarthric databases namely Universal Access and TORGO are used for evaluation. Performance of CNN classifier is superior to ANN as it is an advanced classifier. Further, use of Time-Frequency CNN configuration proved to capture spectro-temporal variations together resulting in an improved performance compared to either Time-CNN or Frequency-CNN configurations which capture either temporal or spectral variations respectively.