Mokgosi, Kesego, Dadgar, Milad, Ennis, Cathy and Ross, Robert (2026) Synthesising Cross-Speaker Data for Low-Resource Pathological Speech Recognition with PEFT. Text, Speech, and Dialogue. pp. 182-193. ISSN 1611-3349
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Abstract
Dysarthric speech recognition is essential for enhancing communication and accessibility for individuals with speech impairments, yet its development is hindered by a scarcity of robust, speaker-specific datasets. This study explores low-resource dysarthric speech recognition through cross-speaker transfer using synthetic data and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We integrate SpeechT5 text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis with x-vector speaker embeddings to generate speaker-specific dysarthric speech, enabling model adaptation while preserving pathological speech characteristics such as prosodic irregularities. Experiments on the TORGO dataset show that mixed cross-synthetic data with LoRA fine-tuning achieves a WER of 0.17, representing a 71.7% improvement over the standard model (0.60 WER) without fine-tuning the TTS model. However, cross-dataset generalisation remains challenging, yielding higher WERs on MINDS-14 (4.69) and AMI (0.96–3.83) datasets. Whilst synthetic data enhances in-domain recognition, further research is needed to improve cross-dataset generalisation and speaker adaptation, particularly for low-resource pathological speech settings.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | 28th International Conference, TSD 2025, Erlangen, Germany, August 25–28, 2025, Proceedings, Part I |
| Keywords: | Dysarthric Speech Recognition; Cross Speaker Transfer; Parameter Efficient; Fine Tuning; Synthetic Data Generation; |
| Academic Unit: | Faculty of Science & Engineering > Computer Science Faculty of Science & Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute |
| Item ID: | 22026 |
| Identification Number: | 10.1007/978-3-032-02548-7_16 |
| Depositing User: | IR Editor |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Nov 2026 15:50 |
| Journal or Publication Title: | Text, Speech, and Dialogue |
| Publisher: | Springer |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Related URLs: | |
| Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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