Towards Hierarchical Spoken Language Disfluency Modeling

Jiachen Lian, Gopala Anumanchipalli

Abstract: Speech dysfluency modeling is the bottleneck for both speech therapy and language learning. However, there is no AI solution to systematically tackle this problem. We first propose to define the concept of dysfluent speech and dysfluent speech modeling. We then present Hierarchical Unconstrained Dysfluency Modeling (H-UDM) approach that addresses both dysfluency transcription and detection to eliminate the need for extensive manual annotation. Furthermore, we introduce a simulated dysfluent dataset called VCTK++ to enhance the capabilities of H-UDM in phonetic transcription. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods in both transcription and detection tasks.