Speech Recognition for Individuals with Complex Congenital Disorders

Background

For individuals, especially children, with complex congenital disorders such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, developmental coordination disorder, or Apert syndrome, fine motor skills and speech are frequently impaired to varying degrees. Despite many of these disabilities having little to no impact on cognitive abilities, individuals in these groups often encounter significant communication challenges, both in spoken and written forms. These communication difficulties can hinder their ability to function effectively in society, leading to various disadvantages.

Commonly used tools for speech recognition such as Google, Apple, or Dragon often struggle to adapt and detect speech that deviates from the norm, rendering them unsuitable for individuals with speech impairments. This is especially true for languages that are not english. In this project, our primary objective is to develop a framework that streamlines and personalizes the training and fine-tuning of speech recognition models in german, thereby addressing the unique communication needs of these individuals.

Short project/thesis topic

The goal of this project is to analyze speech variations and modify an existing German speech corpus so that it can serve as the foundation for training a new model. The Master’s Thesis includes:

• Collect a dataset featuring a speech-impaired child, including tasks such as drafting consent forms, data collection, preprocessing, and data annotation.
• Analyze speech variations and adapt an existing corpus to capture these variations in speech.
• Generate synthetic data to augment the dataset and improve the model’s robustness.
• Train and evaluate a speech recognition model on the adapted dataset.

Requirements

This project has the extent of a MSc-Thesis-Project (For semester project we can discuss partial work) Our ideal master’s student for this project:

• Is self-driven and highly engaged.
• Possesses Python coding skills.
• Is proficient in the German language (ideally).
• Has some knowledge and experience in machine learning and fine-tuning models.