Automatic detection of stuttering in a speech

In the work authors applied speech recognition techniques to find disfluent events. The recognition system based on the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit was built and tested. The set of context dependent HMM models was trained and used to locate speech disturbances. Authors were not concentrated on specific disfluency type but tried to find any extraneous sounds in a speech signal. Patients read prepared sentences, the system recognized them and then results were compared to manual transcriptions. It allowed the system to be more robust and enabled to find all disfluencies types appearing at word boundaries. Such system can by utilized in many ways, for example like a "preprocessor" that finds strange sounds in a speech to be analyzed or classified by other algorithms later, to evaluate or track therapy process of stuttering people, to evaluate speech fluency by ´normal´ speakers, etc.