We describe an efficient procedure for automatic repair of quickly transcribed (QT) speech. QT speech, typically closed captioned data from television broadcasts, usually has a significant number of deletions and misspellings, and has a characteristic absence of disfluencies such as filled pauses (for example, um, uh). Errors of these kinds often throw an acoustic model training program out of ...

This article presents a simple method of analysing speech test scores which are biased through ceiling effects. Eighty postlingually deafened adults implanted with a MED-EL COMBI 40/40+ cochlear implant (CI) were administered a numbers test and a sentence test at initial device activation and at 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 months thereafter. As a measure for speech recognition performance, the number of...

An adaptive maximum-likelihood procedure (MLP), typically used for threshold measurements in psychoacoustics, was adopted for the measurement of speech intelligibility, with the use of the modified rhyme test (MRT) [1]. The advantage of the MLP over the fixed step up-down adaptive procedures usually employed in adaptive speech intelligibility tests is that the MLP imposes no restrictions on the...

This paper presents a study into the feasibility of extracting a corpus of expressive speech from television soap opera dialogue. We investigated how dialogue can be extracted from television production tapes, and what kind of signal quality may be expected. We analysed to what extent the scripts that are used in television production can provide a transcription of the actual dialogue. From the...

Quick tour of NLP and speech technologies for ambient assisted living To address the challenges imposed by an ageing population, developed countries are massively supporting the development Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). ICT represents a great opportunity to improve the daily life of the elderly so that they always keep control over their life and use technology to continue t...

Abstract Speech-in-noise performance is fundamental to daily communications and comprehensive characterization needed. We studied 590 dementia-free participants aged 70-84 years, including 428 hearing-impaired from the Aging Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders (ACHIEVE) study baseline (2018-19), which a randomized controlled trial partially nested within Atherosclerosis Risk Communities (ARIC...

Temporal patterns in human movement, and in speech in particular, occur on multiple timescales. Regularities in such patterns have been observed between speech gestures, which are relatively quick movements of articulators (e.g., tongue fronting and lip protrusion), and also between rhythmic units (e.g., syllables and metrical feet), which occur more slowly. Previous work has shown that pattern...

An acceptable noise level (ANL) procedure for measuring hearing aid directional benefit was compared with masked speech reception threshold (SRT) and front-to-back ratio (FBR) procedures. ANL is the difference between the most comfortable listening level and the maximum accepted background noise level while listening to speech. Forty adult subjects wearing their own binaural hearing aids were e...

Background: validation of a screening test to detect speech disorders in children. Aim: to present validation data of a new speech disorders screening test (Terdaf), developed by Brazilian researchers. Method: 2,027 children, of both genders, enrolled in the first grade of elementary public schools in Canoas (Brazil) during 2001 were selected by a probabilistic cluster sampling. In order to ver...

Spontaneous conversations are an integral element in many CSCW environments. Although speech is often regarded as the most natural and effective way of communication between human beings, speech data are not efficient for quick review. One solution to help people access speech data efficiently in CSCW environments is to conduct speech summarization. Up till now, most speech summarization resear...