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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tobin, Jimmy, Tomanek, Katrin, Venugopalan, Subhashini
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19315
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author Tobin, Jimmy
Tomanek, Katrin
Venugopalan, Subhashini
author_facet Tobin, Jimmy
Tomanek, Katrin
Venugopalan, Subhashini
contents This study investigates the impact of integrating a dataset of disordered speech recordings ($\sim$1,000 hours) into the fine-tuning of a near state-of-the-art ASR baseline system. Contrary to what one might expect, despite the data being less than 1% of the training data of the ASR system, we find a considerable improvement in disordered speech recognition accuracy. Specifically, we observe a 33% improvement on prompted speech, and a 26% improvement on a newly gathered spontaneous, conversational dataset of disordered speech. Importantly, there is no significant performance decline on standard speech recognition benchmarks. Further, we observe that the proposed tuning strategy helps close the gap between the baseline system and personalized models by 64% highlighting the significant progress as well as the room for improvement. Given the substantial benefits of our findings, this experiment suggests that from a fairness perspective, incorporating a small fraction of high quality disordered speech data in a training recipe is an easy step that could be done to make speech technology more accessible for users with speech disabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_19315
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Single ASR Model That Generalizes to Disordered Speech
Tobin, Jimmy
Tomanek, Katrin
Venugopalan, Subhashini
Audio and Speech Processing
This study investigates the impact of integrating a dataset of disordered speech recordings ($\sim$1,000 hours) into the fine-tuning of a near state-of-the-art ASR baseline system. Contrary to what one might expect, despite the data being less than 1% of the training data of the ASR system, we find a considerable improvement in disordered speech recognition accuracy. Specifically, we observe a 33% improvement on prompted speech, and a 26% improvement on a newly gathered spontaneous, conversational dataset of disordered speech. Importantly, there is no significant performance decline on standard speech recognition benchmarks. Further, we observe that the proposed tuning strategy helps close the gap between the baseline system and personalized models by 64% highlighting the significant progress as well as the room for improvement. Given the substantial benefits of our findings, this experiment suggests that from a fairness perspective, incorporating a small fraction of high quality disordered speech data in a training recipe is an easy step that could be done to make speech technology more accessible for users with speech disabilities.
title Towards a Single ASR Model That Generalizes to Disordered Speech
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19315