Gaussian Mixture Model Based Classification of Stuttering Dysfluencies

Abstract

The classification of dysfluencies is one of the important steps in objective measurement of stuttering disorder. In this work, the focus is on investigating the applicability of automatic speaker recognition (ASR) method for stuttering dysfluency recognition. The system designed for this particular task relies on the Gaussian mixture model (GMM), which is the most widely used probabilistic modeling technique in ASR. The GMM parameters are estimated from Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). This statistical speaker-modeling technique represents the fundamental characteristic sounds of speech signal. Using this model, we build a dysfluency recognizer that is capable of recognizing dysfluencies irrespective of a person as well as what is being said. The performance of the system is evaluated for different types of dysfluencies such as syllable repetition, word repetition, prolongation, and interjection using speech samples from the University College London Archive of Stuttered Speech (UCLASS).