Domain Adversarial Neural Networks for Dysarthric Speech Recognition
This work addresses improved speech recognition for individuals with dysarthria, representing an incremental advance in domain adaptation methods.
The paper tackled the problem of degraded speech recognition for dysarthric speech by applying domain adversarial neural networks (DANN) to the UAS dataset, achieving a 74.91% recognition rate and outperforming the baseline by 12.18%.
Speech recognition systems have improved dramatically over the last few years, however, their performance is significantly degraded for the cases of accented or impaired speech. This work explores domain adversarial neural networks (DANN) for speaker-independent speech recognition on the UAS dataset of dysarthric speech. The classification task on 10 spoken digits is performed using an end-to-end CNN taking raw audio as input. The results are compared to a speaker-adaptive (SA) model as well as speaker-dependent (SD) and multi-task learning models (MTL). The experiments conducted in this paper show that DANN achieves an absolute recognition rate of 74.91% and outperforms the baseline by 12.18%. Additionally, the DANN model achieves comparable results to the SA model's recognition rate of 77.65%. We also observe that when labelled dysarthric speech data is available DANN and MTL perform similarly, but when they are not DANN performs better than MTL.