Automatic assessment of dysarthria severity level using audio descriptors

Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment, often characterized by speech that is generally indiscernible by human listeners. Assessment of the severity level of dysarthria provides an understanding of the patient's progression in the underlying cause and is essential for planning therapy, as well as improving automatic dysarthric speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a non-linguistic manner of automatic assessment of severity levels using audio descriptors or a set of features traditionally used to define timbre of musical instruments and have been modified to suit this purpose. Multitapered spectral estimation based features were computed and used for classification, in addition to the audio descriptors for timbre. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was trained to classify speech into various severity levels within Universal Access dysarthric speech corpus and the TORGO database. An average classification accuracy of 96.44% and 98.7% was obtained for UA speech corpus and TORGO database respectively.