【Title】A forced alignment approach to detect Chinese repetitive stuttering

【Author】ZHANG Junbo~1 YAN Qian~2 GAO Xinglong~1 PAN Fuping~1 FENG Yongqiang~1 XING Lili~2 LIN Chunlan~2 PAN Jielin~1 (1 Key Laboratory of Speech Acoustics and Content Understanding,Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190) (2 Prof.Lin’s Speech Training Center Beijing 102600)

【Abstract】A forced alignment based algorithms to detect Chinese repetitive stuttering is studied. According to the features of repetitions in Chinese stuttered speech,improvement solutions are provided based on the previous research findings.First,a multi-span looping forced alignment decoding networks is designed to detect multi-syllable repetitions in Chinese stuttered speech.Second,branch penalty factor is added in the networks to adjust decoding trend using recursive search in order to reduce the error from the complexity of the decoding networks. Finally,we re-judge the detected stutters by calculating confidence to improve the reliability of the detection result.The experimental results show that compared to previous algorithm,the proposed algorithm can improve system performance significantly,about 18%average detection error rate relatively.