Automatic Disfluency Detection From Untranscribed Speech

Abstract

Speech disfluencies, such as filled pauses or repetitions, are disruptions in the typical flow of speech. All speakers experience disfluencies at times, and the rate at which we produce disfluencies may be increased by certain speaker or environmental characteristics. Modeling disfluencies has been shown to be useful for a range of downstream tasks, and as a result, disfluency detection has many potential applications. In this work, we investigate language, acoustic, and multimodal methods for frame-level automatic disfluency detection and categorization. Each of these methods relies on audio as an input. First, we evaluate several automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in terms of their ability to transcribe disfluencies, measured using disfluency error rates. We then use these ASR transcripts as input to a language-based disfluency detection model. We find that disfluency detection performance is largely limited by the quality of transcripts and alignments. We find that an acoustic-based approach that does not require transcription as an intermediate step outperforms the ASR language approach. Finally, we present multimodal architectures which we find improve disfluency detection performance over the unimodal approaches. Ultimately, this work introduces novel approaches for automatic frame-level disfluency and categorization. In the long term, this will help researchers incorporate automatic disfluency detection into a range of applications.