STARDUST
Speech Recognition for People with
Severe Dysarthria
This is the home page of the STARDUST project.
STARDUST is funded by the UK NHS NEAT programme from September
2000 for three years.
STARDUST is a collaboration between
- The SChool of Health And Related Research (SCHARR),
University of Sheffield
- The SPeech AND Hearing Research Group, Department of Computer
Science, University of Sheffield (SPandH).
- Barnsley District General Hospital
Introduction
Dysarthria is a common speech disorder which,
in its severest form, results in unintelligible speech. This
disorder is commonly associated with other general neuromotor
disabilities. People with these disabilities may have difficulty
in making themselves understood as well as in reliably controlling
environmental and communication aids. We propose to apply
state-of-the-art Speech Technology research to the recognition of
severely dysarthric speech. Off-the-shelf automatic speech
recognition (ASR) systems function poorly for these users because
of the increased variability of their articulations compared to
normal speech and the difficulty of finding suitable corpora for
training the recogniser. To overcome these problems we propose to
develop a software application which integrates three functions:
- Real-time visual feedback to assist
dysarthric speakers to improve the consistency of their
vocalisations.
- Speech recognition capability with
improved tolerance to speech variability.
- The ability to tailor the package to
the needs of the client: to modify the feedback as training
proceeds and to construct new recognisers incrementally as
data is collected.
The speech recognition software application
will then be deployed to control electronic assistive technology,
either a communication aid or an environmental control system.
Contact
stardust@dcs.shef.ac.uk