Shuanglin Li

Yichun Li, Shuanglin Li, Syed Mohsen Naqvi

Mental disorders are among the foremost contributors to the global healthcare challenge. Research indicates that timely diagnosis and intervention are vital in treating various mental disorders. However, the early somatization symptoms of certain mental disorders may not be immediately evident, often resulting in their oversight and misdiagnosis. Additionally, the traditional diagnosis methods incur high time and cost. Deep learning methods based on fMRI and EEG have improved the efficiency of the mental disorder detection process. However, the cost of the equipment and trained staff are generally huge. Moreover, most systems are only trained for a specific mental disorder and are not general-purpose. Recently, physiological studies have shown that there are some speech and facial-related symptoms in a few mental disorders (e.g., depression and ADHD). In this paper, we focus on the emotional expression features of mental disorders and introduce a multimodal mental disorder diagnosis system based on audio-visual information input. Our proposed system is based on spatial-temporal attention networks and innovative uses a less computationally intensive pre-train audio recognition network to fine-tune the video recognition module for better results. We also apply the unified system for multiple mental disorders (ADHD and depression) for the first time. The proposed system achieves over 80\% accuracy on the real multimodal ADHD dataset and achieves state-of-the-art results on the depression dataset AVEC 2014.

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.

Shuhe Li, Chenxu Guo, Jiachen Lian et al.

Early evaluation of children's language is frustrated by the high pitch, long phones, and sparse data that derail automatic speech recognisers. We introduce K-Function, a unified framework that combines accurate sub-word transcription, objective scoring, and actionable feedback. Its core, Kids-WFST, merges a Wav2Vec2 phoneme encoder with a phoneme-similarity Dysfluent-WFST to capture child-specific errors while remaining fully interpretable. Kids-WFST attains 1.39% phoneme error on MyST and 8.61% on Multitudes--absolute gains of 10.47 and 7.06 points over a greedy-search decoder. These high-fidelity transcripts power an LLM that grades verbal skills, milestones, reading, and comprehension, aligning with human proctors and supplying tongue-and-lip visualizations plus targeted advice. The results show that precise phoneme recognition cements a complete diagnostic-feedback loop, paving the way for scalable, clinician-ready language assessment.

Shuanglin Li, Ruxiao Qian, Siyang Song

Self-supervised learning (SSL) yields powerful, context-rich representations for speech emotion recognition (SER), yet aggregating these representations into holistic descriptors remains a bottleneck. Conventional first-order aggregation implicitly assumes feature independence, which overlooks the latent Riemannian geometry and discards higher-order relationships essential to the representational power of the backbone. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel Second-Order Correlation (SOC) layer. Instead of treating features in isolation, SOC models feature correlations as covariance descriptors to capture synergistic co-occurrence patterns, which serve as discriminative signatures for robust emotion recognition. By mapping these descriptors from the Riemannian manifold to a Euclidean tangent space through Log-Euclidean mapping (LEM), the proposed method preserves geometric integrity while enabling direct linear discriminative learning. Extensive experiments on the ESD and RAVDESS datasets demonstrate that SOC recovers discriminative information lost in first-order pooling and effectively aggregates high-dimensional SSL features.