Anonymization of Stuttered Speech -- Removing Speaker Information while Preserving the Utterance

Abstract

Concealing the identity through speaker anonymization is essential in various situations. This study focuses on investigating how stuttering affects the anonymization process. Two scenarios are considered: preserving the pathology in the diagnostic/remote treatment context and obfuscating the pathology. The paper examines the effectiveness of three state-of-theart approaches in achieving high anonymization, as well as the preservation of dysfluencies. The findings indicate that while a speaker conversion method may not achieve perfect anonymization (Baseline 27.25% EER and F0 Delta 32.63% EER), it does preserve the pathology. This effect was objectively evaluated by performing a stuttering classification. Although this solution may be useful in a remote treatment scenario for speech pathologies, it presents a vulnerability in anonymization. To address this issue, we propose an alternative approach that uses automatic speech recognition and text-based speech synthesis to avoid re-identification (48.27% EER).