26 accepted papers
Existing methods for analyzing linguistic content from picture descriptions for assessment of cognitive-linguistic impairment often overlook the participant’s visual narrative path, which typically requires eye tracking to assess. Spatio-semantic graphs are a useful tool for analyzing this narrative…
Hypernasality, a speech resonance disorder characterized by excessive nasal airflow, presents challenges in accurate detection across languages. Traditional assessments of hypernasality include perceptual evaluation and nasometry. More recently, objective acoustic measures based on formant analysis…
This position paper argues that post-deployment monitoring in clinical AI is underdeveloped and proposes statistically valid and label-efficient testing frameworks as a principled foundation for ensuring reliability and safety in real-world deployment. A recent review found that only 9\% of FDA-regi…
Recent applications of decorrelation methods to the multi-head attention layers and output embeddings of transformer-based models have resulted in improvements in efficiency and accuracy. Despite these advancements, there is a lack of research focused on the influence of decorrelation on transformer…
Training robust clinical speech-based models that generalize requires large sample sizes because speech is variable and high-dimensional. Researchers have turned to foundational models, such as the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to generate lower-dimensional embeddin…
Researchers have observed that the frequencies of leading digits in many man-made and naturally occurring datasets follow a logarithmic curve, with digits that start with the number 1 accounting for ~ 30% of all numbers in the dataset and digits that start with the number 9 accounting for ~ 5% of al…
A good supervised embedding for a specific machine learning task is only sensitive to changes in the label of interest and is invariant to other confounding factors. We leverage the concept of repeatability from measurement theory to describe this property and propose to use the intra-class correlat…
There is a growing need for models that are interpretable and have reduced energy/computational cost (e.g., in health care analytics and federated learning). Examples of algorithms to train such models include logistic regression and boosting. However, one challenge facing these algorithms is that t…
Two-sample tests evaluate whether two samples are realizations of the same distribution (the null hypothesis) or two different distributions (the alternative hypothesis). We consider a new setting for this problem where sample features are easily measured whereas sample labels are unknown and costly…
Hypernasality refers to the perception of abnormal nasal resonances in vowels and voiced consonants. Estimation of hypernasality severity from connected speech samples involves learning a mapping between the frame-level features and utterance-level clinical ratings of hypernasality. However, not all…
Hypernasality refers to the perception of excessive nasal resonance during the production of oral sounds. Existing methods for automatic assessment of hypernasality from speech are based on machine learning models trained on disordered speech databases rated by speech-language pathologists. However,…
Accurately and efficiently characterizing the decision boundary of classifiers is important for problems related to model selection and meta-learning. Inspired by topological data analysis, the characterization of decision boundaries using their homology has recently emerged as a general and powerfu…
Regularization is an effective way to promote the generalization performance of machine learning models. In this paper, we focus on label smoothing, a form of output distribution regularization that prevents overfitting of a neural network by softening the ground-truth labels in the training data in…
A key initial step in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks involves embedding phrases of text to vectors of real numbers that preserve semantic meaning. To that end, several methods have been recently proposed with impressive results on semantic similarity tasks. However, all of these app…
The usage of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) on resource-constrained edge devices has been limited due to their high computation and large memory requirement. In this work, we propose an algorithm to compress DNNs by jointly optimizing structured sparsity and quantization constraints in a single DNN trai…
Detecting early signs of neurodegeneration is vital for planning treatments for neurological diseases. Speech plays an important role in this context because it has been shown to be a promising early indicator of neurological decline, and because it can be acquired remotely without the need for spec…
Hypernasal speech is a common symptom across several neurological disorders; however it has a variable acoustic signature, making it difficult to quantify acoustically or perceptually. In this paper, we propose the nasal cognate distinctiveness features as an objective proxy for hypernasal speech. O…
Estimating density functionals of analog sources is an important problem in statistical signal processing and information theory. Traditionally, estimating these quantities requires either making parametric assumptions about the underlying distributions or using non-parametric density estimation fol…
Training machine learning algorithms for speech applications requires large, labeled training data sets. This is problematic for clinical applications where obtaining such data is prohibitively expensive because of privacy concerns or lack of access. As a result, clinical speech applications typical…
Persistent cough is a symptom common to a number of respiratory disorders; however, reliable monitoring of cough frequency and cough severity over an extended period of time can be a challenge. Traditional methods involve subjective evaluation by care providers or patient self-reports. As an alterna…
Instrumental analysis of speech sometimes complements subjective evaluations in speech and language therapy; however, apart from elemental speech features such as pitch and formant statistics, higher dimensional spectral features are rarely used in practice because they are clinically uninterpretabl…
Objective assessment of pathological speech is an important part of existing systems for automatic diagnosis and treatment of various speech disorders. In this paper, we propose a new regression method for this application. Rather than treating speech samples from each speaker as individual data ins…
In this paper, we extend previously developed non-parametric bounds on the Bayes risk in binary classification problems to multi-class problems. In comparison with the well-known Bhattacharyya bound which is typically calculated by employing parametric assumptions, the bounds proposed in this paper…
A reliable online speaking rate estimation tool is useful in many domains, including speech recognition, speech therapy intervention, speaker identification, etc. This paper proposes an online speaking rate estimation model based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Speaking rate is a long-term feat…
The large number of parameters in deep neural networks (DNNs) often makes them prohibitive for low-power devices, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). In this paper, we propose a method to determine the relative importance of all network parameters by measuring the amount of information th…
In regression analysis, outliers in the data can induce a bias in the learned function, resulting in larger errors. In this paper we derive an empirically estimable bound on the regression error based on a Euclidean minimum spanning tree generated from the data. Using this bound as motivation, we pr…