Community-Supported Shared Infrastructure in Support of Speech Accessibility

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Community-Supported Shared Infrastructure in Support of Speech Accessibility
Abstract
Purpose: The Speech Accessibility Project (SAP) intends to facilitate research and development in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other machine learning tasks for people with speech disabilities. The purpose of this article is to introduce this project as a resource for researchers, including baseline analysis of the first released data package. Method: The project aims to facilitate ASR research by collecting, curating, and distributing transcribed U.S. English speech from people with speech and/or language disabilities. Participants record speech from their place of residence by connecting their personal computer, cell phone, and assistive devices, if needed, to the SAP web portal. All samples are manually transcribed, and 30 per participant are annotated using differential diagnostic pattern dimensions. For purposes of ASR experiments, the participants have been randomly assigned to a training set, a development set for controlled testing of a trained ASR, and a test set to evaluate ASR error rate. Results: The SAP 2023-10-05 Data Package contains the speech of 211 people with dysarthria as a correlate of Parkinson's disease, and the associated test set contains 42 additional speakers. A baseline ASR, with a word error rate of 3.4% for typical speakers, transcribes test speech with a word error rate of 36.3%. Fine-tuning reduces the word error rate to 23.7%. Conclusions: Preliminary findings suggest that a large corpus of dysarthric and dysphonic speech has the potential to significantly improve speech technology for people with disabilities. By providing these data to researchers, the SAP intends to significantly accelerate research into accessible speech technology. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27078079
Publication
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Volume
67
Issue
11
Pages
4162-4175
Date
2024-11-07
Journal Abbr
J Speech Lang Hear Res
Language
en
ISSN
1092-4388, 1558-9102
Accessed
13/05/2025, 10:04
Library Catalog
DOI.org (Crossref)
Citation
Hasegawa-Johnson, M., Zheng, X., Kim, H., Mendes, C., Dickinson, M., Hege, E., Zwilling, C., Channell, M. M., Mattie, L., Hodges, H., Ramig, L., Bellard, M., Shebanek, M., Sarι, L., Kalgaonkar, K., Frerichs, D., Bigham, J. P., Findlater, L., Lea, C., … MacDonald, B. (2024). Community-Supported Shared Infrastructure in Support of Speech Accessibility. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(11), 4162–4175. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00122