Manipulation of oral cancer speech using neural articulatory synthesis
This work addresses speech issues for oral cancer patients, but it is incremental as it builds on existing articulatory synthesis methods for a specific clinical application.
The researchers developed an articulatory synthesis framework to synthesize and manipulate speech affected by oral cancer, aiming to aid clinical decisions and reduce patient stress. Objective and subjective evaluations indicated acceptable naturalness, and experiments showed the system could replicate speech problems like those in real oral cancer speech.
We present an articulatory synthesis framework for the synthesis and manipulation of oral cancer speech for clinical decision making and alleviation of patient stress. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that the framework has acceptable naturalness and is worth further investigation. A subsequent subjective vowel and consonant identification experiment showed that the articulatory synthesis system can manipulate the articulatory trajectories so that the synthesised speech reproduces problems present in the ground truth oral cancer speech.