Automatic Prediction of Speech Evaluation Metrics for Dysarthric Speech

During the last decades, automatic speech processing systems witnessed an important progress and achieved remarkable reliability. As a result, such technologies have been exploited in new areas and applications including medical practice. In disordered speech evaluation context, perceptual evaluation is still the most common method used in clinical practice for the diagnosing and the following of the condition progression of patients despite its well documented limits (such as subjectivity). In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for the prediction of dysarthric speech evaluation metrics (intelligibility, severity, articulation impairment) based on the representation of the speech acoustics in the total variability subspace based on the i-vectors paradigm. The proposed approach, evaluated on 129 French dysarthric speakers from the DesPhoAPady and VML databases, is proven to be efficient for the modeling of patient’s production and capable of detecting the evolution of speech quality. Also, low RMSE and high correlation measures are obtained between automatically predicted metrics and perceptual evaluations.