Special Session at Interspeech 2021
While speech recognition systems generally work well on the average population with typical speech characteristics, performance on subgroups with unique speaking patterns is usually significantly worse.
Speech that contains non-standard speech patterns (acoustic-phonetic phonotactic, lexical and prosodic patterns) is particularly challenging, both because of the small population with these speech patterns, and because of the generally higher variance of speech patterns. In the case of dysarthric speech, which is often correlated with mobility or other accessibility limitations, accuracy of existing speech recognition systems is often particularly poor, rendering the technology unusable for many speakers who could benefit the most.
In this oral session, we seek to promote interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers and practitioners addressing this problem, to build community and stimulate research. We invite papers analyzing and improving systems dealing with atypical speech.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of atypical speech
Speech-to-Speech conversion/normalization (e.g. from atypical to typical)
Voice enhancement and convergence to improve intelligibility of spoken content of atypical speech
Automated classification of atypical speech conditions
Robustness of speech processing systems for atypical speech in common application scenarios
Data augmentation techniques to deal with data sparsity
Aspects of creating, managing data quality, and sharing of data sets of atypical speech
Multi-modal integration (e.g. video and voice) and its application
This special session is part of the main Interspeech 2021 conference. It utilizes the same submission portal, follows Interspeech's submission policy, paper format, and review process. Please refer to the Interspeech 2021 website for more details.
Katrin Tomanek, Google Research
Jordan R. Green, MGH Institute of Health Professions, Harvard University
Bob MacDonald, Google Research
Michael P. Brenner, Harvard University
Fadi Biadsy, Google Research
atypicalspeech.interspeech2021@gmail.com
Due to the number of papers accepted for this Special Session, we decided to organize the Special Session as a poster session with a joint group discussion at the end. Please see the Interspeech 2021 program for details.