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    Synthesising Cross-Speaker Data for Low-Resource Pathological Speech Recognition with PEFT


    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

    Official URL: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID...

    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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