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
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The SChool of Health And Related Research (SCHARR), University of
Sheffield
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The SPeech AND Hearing Research Group, Department of Computer Science,
University of Sheffield (SPandH).
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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:
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Real-time visual feedback to assist dysarthric speakers
to improve the consistency of their vocalisations.
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Speech recognition capability with improved tolerance
to speech variability.
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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