Brittany Morin

Xuanru Zhou, Anshul Kashyap, Steve Li et al.

Dysfluent speech detection is the bottleneck for disordered speech analysis and spoken language learning. Current state-of-the-art models are governed by rule-based systems which lack efficiency and robustness, and are sensitive to template design. In this paper, we propose YOLO-Stutter: a first end-to-end method that detects dysfluencies in a time-accurate manner. YOLO-Stutter takes imperfect speech-text alignment as input, followed by a spatial feature aggregator, and a temporal dependency extractor to perform region-wise boundary and class predictions. We also introduce two dysfluency corpus, VCTK-Stutter and VCTK-TTS, that simulate natural spoken dysfluencies including repetition, block, missing, replacement, and prolongation. Our end-to-end method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a minimum number of trainable parameters for on both simulated data and real aphasia speech. Code and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/rorizzz/YOLO-Stutter

Xuanru Zhou, Cheol Jun Cho, Ayati Sharma et al.

Current de-facto dysfluency modeling methods utilize template matching algorithms which are not generalizable to out-of-domain real-world dysfluencies across languages, and are not scalable with increasing amounts of training data. To handle these problems, we propose Stutter-Solver: an end-to-end framework that detects dysfluency with accurate type and time transcription, inspired by the YOLO object detection algorithm. Stutter-Solver can handle co-dysfluencies and is a natural multi-lingual dysfluency detector. To leverage scalability and boost performance, we also introduce three novel dysfluency corpora: VCTK-Pro, VCTK-Art, and AISHELL3-Pro, simulating natural spoken dysfluencies including repetition, block, missing, replacement, and prolongation through articulatory-encodec and TTS-based methods. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all available dysfluency corpora. Code and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/eureka235/Stutter-Solver

Xuanru Zhou, Jiachen Lian, Cheol Jun Cho et al.

Speech dysfluency modeling is a task to detect dysfluencies in speech, such as repetition, block, insertion, replacement, and deletion. Most recent advancements treat this problem as a time-based object detection problem. In this work, we revisit this problem from a new perspective: tokenizing dysfluencies and modeling the detection problem as a token-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) problem. We propose rule-based speech and text dysfluency simulators and develop VCTK-token, and then develop a Whisper-like seq2seq architecture to build a new benchmark with decent performance. We also systematically compare our proposed token-based methods with time-based methods, and propose a unified benchmark to facilitate future research endeavors. We open-source these resources for the broader scientific community. The project page is available at https://rorizzz.github.io/

Jiachen Lian, Xuanru Zhou, Zoe Ezzes et al.

Speech dysfluency modeling is the core module for spoken language learning, and speech therapy. However, there are three challenges. First, current state-of-the-art solutions\cite{lian2023unconstrained-udm, lian-anumanchipalli-2024-towards-hudm} suffer from poor scalability. Second, there is a lack of a large-scale dysfluency corpus. Third, there is not an effective learning framework. In this paper, we propose \textit{SSDM: Scalable Speech Dysfluency Modeling}, which (1) adopts articulatory gestures as scalable forced alignment; (2) introduces connectionist subsequence aligner (CSA) to achieve dysfluency alignment; (3) introduces a large-scale simulated dysfluency corpus called Libri-Dys; and (4) develops an end-to-end system by leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs). We expect SSDM to serve as a standard in the area of dysfluency modeling. Demo is available at \url{https://berkeley-speech-group.github.io/SSDM/}.

Jinming Zhang, Xuanru Zhou, Jiachen Lian et al.

Speech dysfluency detection is crucial for clinical diagnosis and language assessment, but existing methods are limited by the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. Although recent advances in TTS model have enabled synthetic dysfluency generation, existing synthetic datasets suffer from unnatural prosody and limited contextual diversity. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-Dys -- the most comprehensive dysfluent speech corpus with LLM-enhanced dysfluency simulation. This dataset captures 11 dysfluency categories spanning both word and phoneme levels. Building upon this resource, we improve an end-to-end dysfluency detection framework. Experimental validation demonstrates state-of-the-art performance. All data, models, and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/Berkeley-Speech-Group/LLM-Dys.

Zongli Ye, Jiachen Lian, Xuanru Zhou et al.

Accurate alignment of dysfluent speech with intended text is crucial for automating the diagnosis of neurodegenerative speech disorders. Traditional methods often fail to model phoneme similarities effectively, limiting their performance. In this work, we propose Neural LCS, a novel approach for dysfluent text-text and speech-text alignment. Neural LCS addresses key challenges, including partial alignment and context-aware similarity mapping, by leveraging robust phoneme-level modeling. We evaluate our method on a large-scale simulated dataset, generated using advanced data simulation techniques, and real PPA data. Neural LCS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in both alignment accuracy and dysfluent speech segmentation. Our results demonstrate the potential of Neural LCS to enhance automated systems for diagnosing and analyzing speech disorders, offering a more accurate and linguistically grounded solution for dysfluent speech alignment.

Chenxu Guo, Jiachen Lian, Xuanru Zhou et al.

Automatic detection of speech dysfluency aids speech-language pathologists in efficient transcription of disordered speech, enhancing diagnostics and treatment planning. Traditional methods, often limited to classification, provide insufficient clinical insight, and text-independent models misclassify dysfluency, especially in context-dependent cases. This work introduces Dysfluent-WFST, a zero-shot decoder that simultaneously transcribes phonemes and detects dysfluency. Unlike previous models, Dysfluent-WFST operates with upstream encoders like WavLM and requires no additional training. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in both phonetic error rate and dysfluency detection on simulated and real speech data. Our approach is lightweight, interpretable, and effective, demonstrating that explicit modeling of pronunciation behavior in decoding, rather than complex architectures, is key to improving dysfluency processing systems.