Residual Neural Network precisely quantifies dysarthria severity-level based on short-duration speech segments

Recently, we have witnessed Deep Learning methodologies gaining significant attention for severity-based classification of dysarthric speech. Detecting dysarthria, quantifying its severity, are of paramount importance in various real-life applications, such as the assessment of patients’ progression in treatments, which includes an adequate planning of their therapy and the improvement of speech-based interactive systems in order to handle pathologically-affected voices automatically. Notably, current speech-powered tools often deal with short-duration speech segments and, consequently, are less efficient in dealing with impaired speech, even by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Thus, detecting dysarthria severity-level based on short speech segments might help in improving the performance and applicability of those systems. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel Residual Network (ResNet)-based technique which receives short-duration speech segments as input. Statistically meaningful objective analysis of our experiments, reported over standard Universal Access corpus, exhibits average values of 21.35% and 22.48% improvement, compared to the baseline CNN, in terms of classification accuracy and F1-score, respectively. For additional comparisons, tests with Gaussian Mixture Models and Light CNNs were also performed. Overall, the values of 98.90% and 98.00% for classification accuracy and F1-score, respectively, were obtained with the proposed ResNet approach, confirming its efficacy and reassuring its practical applicability.