Deep learning-based speech recognition for Korean elderly speech data including dementia patients

Abstract

In this paper we consider automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Korean speech data in which elderly persons randomly speak a sequence of words such as animals and vegetables for one minute. Most of the speakers are over 60 years old and some of them are dementia patients. The goal is to compare deep-learning based ASR models for such data and to find models with good performance. ASR is a technology that can recognize spoken words and convert them into written text by computers. Recently, many deep-learning models with good performance have been developed for ASR. Training data for such models are mostly composed of the form of sentences. Furthermore, the speakers in the data should be able to pronounce accurately in most cases. However, in our data, most of the speakers are over the age of 60 and often have incorrect pronunciation. Also, it is Korean speech data in which speakers randomly say series of words, not sentences, for one minute. Therefore, pre-trained models based on typical training data may not be suitable for our data, and hence we train deep-learning based ASR models from scratch using our data. We also apply some data augmentation methods due to small data size.