Integrating Disfluency-based and Prosodic Features with Acoustics in Automatic Fluency Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech

Huaijin Deng, Youchao Lin, Takehito Utsuro, Akio Kobayashi, Hiromitsu Nishizaki, Junichi Hoshino


Abstract
This paper describes an automatic fluency evaluation of spontaneous speech. In the task of automatic fluency evaluation, we integrate diverse features of acoustics, prosody, and disfluency-based ones. Then, we attempt to reveal the contribution of each of those diverse features to the task of automatic fluency evaluation. Although a variety of different disfluencies are observed regularly in spontaneous speech, we focus on two types of phenomena, i.e., filled pauses and word fragments. The experimental results demonstrate that the disfluency-based features derived from word fragments and filled pauses are effective relative to evaluating fluent/disfluent speech, especially when combined with prosodic features, e.g., such as speech rate and pauses/silence. Next, we employed an LSTM based framework in order to integrate the disfluency-based and prosodic features with time sequential acoustic features. The experimental evaluation results of those integrated diverse features indicate that time sequential acoustic features contribute to improving the model with disfluency-based and prosodic features when detecting fluent speech, but not when detecting disfluent speech. Furthermore, when detecting disfluent speech, the model without time sequential acoustic features performs best even without word fragments features, but only with filled pauses and prosodic features.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.791
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6429–6437
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.791
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huaijin Deng, Youchao Lin, Takehito Utsuro, Akio Kobayashi, Hiromitsu Nishizaki, and Junichi Hoshino. 2020. Integrating Disfluency-based and Prosodic Features with Acoustics in Automatic Fluency Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6429–6437, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Disfluency-based and Prosodic Features with Acoustics in Automatic Fluency Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech (Deng et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.791.pdf