SIAS: Speech Intelligibility of Atypical Speech

Obtaining speech intelligibility ratings generally involve subjective and time-consuming human annotations. The SIAS studies the possibilities of automatic objective information sources. By doing so, insights as to what speech intelligibility is, can be gained.

Principal investigator

Helmer Strik

Resource types

Tools

Speech intelligibility (SI) is gradually becoming more important in speech therapy and language learning, for evaluating pathological and non-native speech, respectively. However, SI is a complex construct, there are no standard procedures to obtain SI ratings, and current procedures generally involve human annotations, which are subjective and time-consuming.

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Fellowship presentation by Helmer Strik

About the project

In the current project, we will study the possible contribution of automatic, objective information sources: ‘Automatic Speech Recognition’ (ASR) and acoustic phonetic features (APFs). We will study the relations between APFs, human and ASR-based SI ratings for all words together, and for classes of words based on ‘part of speech’ (POS) tags. These APFs will not only provide novel scientific insights into SI, they will also contribute useful information for diagnosis and therapy (for pathological speech) and for language education (for non-native speech).

The general goal of the research is to study to what extent automatic, objective measures obtained by means of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and forced alignment (FA) can be used to acquire novel insights and obtain information about speech intelligibility (SI). For this purpose, the following CLARIAH components are used: KALDI Speech recogniser for Dutch (ASR), Forced Alignment (FoAl) and Alpino & Frog (Parsing).

Current developments