Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Diffusion-Based Speech Enhancement for Dysarthric Speech
Dimme de Groot (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Tanvina Patel (Erasmus MC, TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Devendra Kayande (Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Odette Scharenborg (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Zhengjun Yue (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
Dysarthric speech poses significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems due to its high variability and reduced intelligibility. In this work we explore the use of diffusion models for dysarthric speech enhancement, which is based on the hypothesis that using diffusion-based speech enhancement moves the distribution of dysarthric speech closer to that of typical speech, which could potentially improve dysarthric speech recognition performance. We assess the effect of two diffusion-based and one signal-processing-based speech enhancement algorithms on intelligibility and speech quality of two English dysarthric speech corpora. We applied speech enhancement to both typical and dysarthric speech and evaluate the ASR performance using Whisper-Turbo, and the subjective and objective speech quality of the original and enhanced dysarthric speech. We also fine-tuned Whisper-Turbo on the enhanced speech to assess its impact on recognition performance.
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