Automatic word naming recognition for treatment and assessment of aphasia

VITHEA is an on-line platform designed to act as a “virtual therapist” for the treatment of Portuguese speaking aphasic patients. Concretely, the system integrates automatic speech recognition technology to provide word naming exercises to individuals with lost or reduced word naming ability. In this paper, we present the solution adopted for the word naming task, which is based on a keyword spotting approach with hybrid HMM/MLP speech recognizer. Furthermore, we explore a simple cross-validation method that makes use of the patients measured word naming ability to automatically adapt to their speech particularities. A corpus with word naming therapy sessions of aphasic Portuguese native speakers has been collected to test the utility of the approach for both global evaluation and treatment. In spite of the different patient characteristics and speech quality conditions of the collected data, encouraging results have been obtained.