Introduction to the Issue on Automatic Assessment of Health Disorders Based on Voice, Speech, and Language Processing

Approximately one-fifth of theworld’s population suffer or have suffered from voice and speech production disorders due to diseases or some other dysfunction. Thus, there is a clear need for objective ways to evaluate the quality of voice and speech as well as its link to vocal fold activity, to evaluate the complex interaction between the larynx and voluntary movements of the articulators (i.e., lips, teeth, tongue, velum, jaw, etc), or to evaluate disfluencies at the language level. The underlying assumption is that deviations from patterns that might be considered normal can be correlated with many different symptoms and psychophysical situations. However, despite a large effort in this field in the last few years, useful services are still far fewer than those in other areas of speech technology (text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, speaker recognition and verification, etc.) and, as a result, many results have not been transferred to clinical settings.