TY - CHAP A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Stemmer, Georg A1 - Haderlein, Tino A1 - Schuster, Mario A1 - Rosanowski, Frank A1 - Nöth, Elmar A1 - Maier, Andreas T1 - Towards Robust Automatic Evaluation of Pathologic Telephone Speech T2 - 2007 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition & Understanding (ASRU), Kyoto, Japan, December 2007. N2 - For many aspects of speech therapy an objective evaluation of the intelligibility of a patient's speech is needed. We investigate the evaluation of the intelligibility of speech by means of automatic speech recognition. Previous studies have shown that measures like word accuracy are consistent with human experts' ratings. To ease the patient's burden, it is highly desirable to conduct the assessment via phone. However, the telephone channel influences the quality of the speech signal which negatively affects the results. To reduce inaccuracies, we propose a combination of two speech recognizers. Experiments on two sets of pathological speech show that the combination results in consistent improvements in the correlation between the automatic evaluation and the ratings by human experts. Furthermore, the approach leads to reductions of 10% and 25% of the maximum error of the intelligibility measure. KW - Biomedical acoustics KW - Speech intelligibility KW - Speech processing KW - Acoustic applications Y1 - 2007 SP - 717 EP - 722 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Haderlein, Tino A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Maier, Andreas A1 - Nöth, Elmar A1 - Toy, Hikmet A1 - Rosanowski, Frank T1 - An Automatic Version of the Post-Laryngectomy Telephone Test T2 - TSD 2007, 10th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, Proceedings, Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 2007. N2 - Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is a possibility to restore the ability to speak after total laryngectomy, i.e. the removal of the larynx. The quality of the substitute voice has to be evaluated during therapy. For the intelligibility evaluation of German speakers over telephone, the Post-Laryngectomy Telephone Test (PLTT) was defined. Each patient reads out 20 of 400 different monosyllabic words and 5 out of 100 sentences. A human listener writes down the words and sentences understood and computes an overall score. This paper presents a means of objective and automatic evaluation that can replace the subjective method. The scores of 11 naïve raters for a set of 31 test speakers were compared to the word recognition rate of speech recognizers. Correlation values of about 0.9 were reached. KW - Automatic Speech Recognition KW - Mono Poly KW - Total Laryngectomy KW - Speech Recognition System KW - Automatic Evaluation Y1 - 2007 SP - 238 EP - 245 PB - Springer-Verlag ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Nöth, Elmar A1 - Maier, Andreas A1 - Haderlein, Tino A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Rosanowski, Frank A1 - Schuster, Maria T1 - Automatic Evaluation of Pathologic Speech - from Research to Routine Clinical Use T2 - TSD 2007, 10th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 2007. N2 - Previously we have shown that ASR technology can be used to objectively evaluate pathologic speech. Here we report on progress for routine clinical use: 1) We introduce an easy-to-use recording and evaluation environment. 2) We confirm our previous results for a larger group of patients. 3) We show that telephone speech can be analyzed with the same methods with only a small loss of agreement with human experts. 4) We show that prosodic information leads to more robust results. 5) We show that text reference instead of transliteration can be used for evaluation. Using word accuracy of a speech recognizer and prosodic features as features for SVM regression, we achieve a correlation of .90 between the automatic analysis and human experts. KW - Automatic Speech Recognition KW - Pathologic Speech KW - Automatic Evaluation KW - Prosodic Feature KW - Speech Recognizer Y1 - 2007 SP - 294 EP - 301 PB - Springer-Verlag ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Haderlein, Tino A1 - Schuster, Maria A1 - Rosanowski, Frank A1 - Nöth, Elmar T1 - Automatic Evaluation of Tracheoesophageal Telephone Speech T2 - First International Language Technologies Conference (IS-LTC 2006), Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 2006. N2 - The tracheoesophageal (TE) substitute voice is currently state–of–the–art treatment to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy. The intelligibility while talking over a telephone is an important clinical factor, as it is a crucial part of the patients’ social life. An objective way to rate the intelligibility of substitute voices when talking over a telephone is desirable to improve the post–laryngectomy speech therapy. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system was applied to 41 high quality recordings of post–laryngectomy patients. The ASR system was trained with normal, non–pathologic speech. It yielded a word accuracy (WA) of 36.9%±18.0%; compared to the intelligibility rating of a group of human experts the ASR system had a correlation coefficient of -.88. After downsampling the 41 recordings to telephone quality, the ASR system reached a WA of 26.4%±13.9% leading to a correlation coefficient of -.80. These results confirm that an ASR system can be used for objective intelligibility rating over the telephone. KW - Speech Recognition Y1 - 2006 SP - 17 EP - 22 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haderlein, Tino A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Nöth, Elmar A1 - Toy, Hikmet A1 - Schuster, Maria A1 - Eysholdt, Ulrich A1 - Hornegger, Joachim A1 - Rosanowski, Frank T1 - Application of Automatic Speech Recognition to Quantitative Assessment of Tracheoesophageal Speech in Different Signal Quality JF - Folia Phoniatrica Et Logopaedica N2 - Tracheoesophageal voice is state-of-the-art in voice rehabilitation after laryngectomy. Intelligibility on a telephone is an important evaluation criterion as it is a crucial part of social life. An objective measure of intelligibility when talking on a telephone is desirable in the field of postlaryngectomy speech therapy and its evaluation. Based upon successful earlier studies with broadband speech, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system was applied to 41 recordings of postlaryngectomy patients. Recordings were available in different signal qualities; quality was the crucial criterion for this study. Compared to the intelligibility rating of 5 human experts, the ASR system had a correlation coefficient of r = -0.87 and Krippendorff's alpha of 0.65 when broadband speech was processed. The rater group alone achieved alpha = 0.66. With the test recordings in telephone quality, the system reached r = -0.79 and alpha = 0.67. For medical purposes, a comprehensive diagnostic approach to (substitute) voice has to cover both subjective and objective tests. An automatic recognition system such as the one proposed in this study can be used for objective intelligibility rating with results comparable to those of human experts. This holds for broadband speech as well as for automatic evaluation via telephone. KW - Speech Recognition Software Y1 - 2008 VL - 2008 IS - 61(1) SP - 12 EP - 17 ER -