Voice Biomarker Analysis and Automated Severity Classification of Dysarthric Speech in a Multilingual Context

Abstract

Dysarthria, a motor speech disorder, severely impacts voice quality, pronunciation, and prosody, leading to diminished speech intelligibility and reduced quality of life. Accurate assessment is crucial for effective treatment, but traditional perceptual assessments are limited by their subjectivity and resource intensity. To mitigate the limitations, automatic dysarthric speech assessment methods have been proposed to support clinicians on their decision-making. While these methods have shown promising results, most research has focused on monolingual environments. However, multilingual approaches are necessary to address the global burden of dysarthria and ensure equitable access to accurate diagnosis. This thesis proposes a novel multilingual dysarthria severity classification method, by analyzing three languages: English, Korean, and Tamil.