No abstract

Automatic diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's disease can have a significant impact on society as well as the well-being of patients. The part of the brain cortex that processes language abilities is one of the earliest parts to be affected by the disease. Therefore, detection of Alzheimer's disease using speech-based features is gaining increasing attention. Here, we investigated an extensive set of features based on speech prosody as well as linguistic features derived from transcriptions of Turkish conversations with subjects with and without Alzheimer's disease. Unlike most standardized tests that focus on memory recall or structured conversations, spontaneous unstructured conversations are conducted with the subjects in informal settings. Age-, education-, and gender-controlled experiments are performed to eliminate the effects of those three variables. Experimental results show that the proposed features extracted from the speech signal can be used to discriminate between the control group and the patients with Alzheimer's disease. Prosodic features performed significantly better than the linguistic features. Classification accuracy over 80% was obtained with three of the prosodic features, but experiments with feature fusion did not further improve the classification performance.

In this paper, we present a systematic study of the vulnerability of automatic speaker verification to a diverse range of spoofing attacks. We start with a thorough analysis of the spoofing effects of five speech synthesis and eight voice conversion systems, and the vulnerability of three speaker verification systems under those attacks. We then introduce a number of countermeasures to prevent spoofing attacks from both known and unknown attackers. Known attackers are spoofing systems whose output was used to train the countermeasures, whilst an unknown attacker is a spoofing system whose output was not available to the countermeasures during training. Finally, we benchmark automatic systems against human performance on both speaker verification and spoofing detection tasks.

This paper presents the first version of a speaker verification spoofing and anti-spoofing database, named SAS corpus. The corpus includes nine spoofing techniques, two of which are speech synthesis, and seven are voice conversion. We design two protocols, one for standard speaker verification evaluation, and the other for producing spoofing materials. Hence, they allow the speech synthesis community to produce spoofing materials incrementally without knowledge of speaker verification spoofing and anti-spoofing. To provide a set of preliminary results, we conducted speaker verification experiments using two state-of-the-art systems. Without any anti-spoofing techniques, the two systems are extremely vulnerable to the spoofing attacks implemented in our SAS corpus.

Depression is a common mental health problem leading to significant disability worldwide. It is not only common but also commonly co-occurs with other mental and neurological illnesses. Parkinson’s disease (PD) gives rise to symptoms directly impairing a person’s ability to function. Early diagnosis and detection of depression can aid in treatment, but diagnosis typically requires an interview with a health provider or a structured diagnostic questionnaire. Thus, unobtrusive measures to monitor depression symptoms in daily life could have great utility in screening depression for clinical treatment. Vocal biomarkers of depression are a potentially effective method of assessing depression symptoms in daily life, which is the focus of the current research. We have a database of 921 unique PD patients and their self-assessment of whether they felt depressed or not. Voice recordings from these patients were used to extract paralinguistic features, which served as inputs to machine learning and deep learning techniques to predict depression. The results are presented here, and the limitations are discussed given the nature of the recordings which lack language content. Our models achieved accuracies as high as 0.77 in classifying depressed and nondepressed subjects accurately using their voice features and PD severity. We found depression and severity of PD had a correlation coefficient of 0.3936, providing a valuable feature when predicting depression from voice. Our results indicate a clear correlation between feeling depressed and PD severity. Voice may be an effective digital biomarker to screen for depression among PD patients.