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Dysarthric speech evaluation: automatic and perceptual approaches

Perceptual evaluation is still the most common method in clinical practice for the diagnosis and monitoring of the condition progression of people suffering from dysarthria (or speech disorders more generally). Such evaluations are frequently described as non-trivial, subjective and highly time-consuming (depending on the evaluation level). Clinicians have, therefore, expressed their need for new objective evaluation tools more adapted to longitudinal studies or rehabilitation context. We proposed earlier an automatic approach for the anomaly detection at the phone level for dysarthric speech. The system behavior was studied and validated on different corpora and speech styles. Nonetheless, the lack of annotated French dysarthric speech corpora has limited our capacity to analyze some aspects of its behavior, and notably,its severity (more anomalies detected automatically compared with human expert). To overcome this limitation, we proposed an original perceptual evaluation protocol applied to a limited set of decisions made by the automatic system, related to the presence of anomalies. This evaluation was carried out by a jury of 29 non-naive individuals. In addition to interesting information related to the system behavior, the evaluation protocol highlighted the difficulty for a human, even expert, to apprehend and detect deviations at the word level in dysarthric speech.